All posts tagged Maugham

The Magician by William Somerset Maugham (1908)

‘It was the face of a fiend of wickedness.’ (Susie describing Oliver Haddo)

This is, surprisingly for Maugham, a full-blown, hair-raising horror story.

The set-up

The book begins as a fairly run-of-the-mill love story. Young English surgeon Arthur Burdon knew Margaret Dauncey’s parents. When they died he was named the girl’s executor and guardian, a duty he faithfully performed. When Margaret turned 17 she expressed a wish to go to Paris to study art, which Arthur supported and enabled. It was during her studies in Paris that Margaret discovered her father had died penniless and that Arthur had paid for her entire education and living expenses out of his own pocket.

During the tearful conversation where Margaret asks if this is true and Arthur admits it, they both also admit that they’re deeply in love with each other.

‘Don’t you know that I’d do anything in the world for you?’ she cried.

And the upshot of these tearful confessions is that agree on the spot that they would like to get married. Nonetheless, Arthur insists that she goes off to Paris to study, see life and so on, before they get wed. He is a thoroughly decent chap.

In Paris Margaret stays in the studio of Susie Boyd (at 30, a lot older and more experienced than Margaret), located in Montparnasse, and becomes a regular at the local bar, Le Chien Noir, much frequented by poets, writers and artists.

It is at this point that the story proper begins, with Arthur arriving in Paris to meet Margaret and finalise plans for their wedding (all the preceding is told as exposition).

Commenting on the action is a much older man, Dr Porhoët, who was friends with Arthur’s parents and has known him ever since he was born. Dr Porhoët is a wise and bookish old man. He spent most of life working as a doctor in Egypt and is now retired, thus conveniently available to the characters for tea, conversation and advice as required.

Porhoët candidly tells Arthur he is surprised that he and Margaret are in love because Arthur is such an extremely unimaginative, prosaic, practical man who, by dint of working hard, has made himself into a leading surgeon – whereas Margaret is young and fanciful, not only beautiful but highly imaginative.

The magician

So far, so standard. The novel looks like settling down to become another of Maugham’s stories about the trials and tribulations of another mismatched couple. Except that into this fairly run-of-the-mill setup Maugham throws a bomb, in the shape of the tall, monstrously obese, absurdly flamboyant and utterly sinister, self-proclaimed magician and master of the dark arts, Oliver Haddo.

In the introduction to The Magician which Maugham wrote years later, he freely admits to basing the character of Haddo on the notorious black magician, writer, poet and self-publicist Aleister Crowley, who he met in Paris in the early-1900s, when Maugham was living with the painter Gerald Kelly.

In fact not only Haddo-Crowley but many of the other characters and settings are borrowed directly from life. Margaret’s studio is modelled on Kelly’s. Maugham and Kelly were regulars at a bar in Montparnasse called Le Chat Blanc, where local poets and artists congregated almost every evening. In the book this café becomes Le Chien Noir and many of its real-life habitués are coped into Maugham’s book with only slightly altered names. Maugham was notoriously sloppy about this, writing many of his stories almost directly from life and sometimes not even bothering to change people’s names – a habit which got him into trouble, particularly in the classic short stories from south-east Asia a generation later.

The main characters

I enjoy the old-fashioned way Maugham gives detailed, physical and psychological descriptions of his characters – unlike the modern style for fleeting, brief flashes, or having character revealed by dialogue. In Maugham every character is sat down, given a cup of tea, and thoroughly introduced to the reader.

I like the way they appear stiflingly conventional but often have unexpected aspects. We’re so culturally conditioned by Hollywood and advertising stereotypes to expect protagonists of dramas to beyoung, physically fit and good-looking protagonists that it’s a pleasure to go back before the domination of American advertising to be presented with characters who are far more diverse in age and quality. Who, en masse, bespeak an entirely different set of values. Here’s the hero, Arthur:

He was very tall and very thin. His frame had a Yorkshireman’s solidity, and his bones were massive. He missed being ungainly only through the serenity of his self-reliance. He had high cheek-bones and a long, lean face. His nose and mouth were large, and his skin was sallow. But there were two characteristics which fascinated her, an imposing strength of purpose and a singular capacity for suffering.

Margaret is the most stereotypical of the characters, being young and beautiful. But I still enjoyed the way the longest description of her occurs while she and Arthur are looking at a statue of a perfect young woman in the Louvre:

In Arthur’s eyes Margaret had all the exquisite grace of the statue, and the same unconscious composure; and in her also breathed the spring odours of ineffable purity. Her features were chiselled with the clear and divine perfection of this Greek girl’s; her ears were as delicate and as finely wrought. The colour of her skin was so tender that it reminded you vaguely of all beautiful soft things, the radiance of sunset and the darkness of the night, the heart of roses and the depth of running water. The goddess’s hand was raised to her right shoulder, and Margaret’s hand was as small, as dainty, and as white.

Whereas here is Maugham’s meticulous description of the older Susie:

She was one of those plain women whose plainness does not matter. A gallant Frenchman had to her face called her a belle laide, and, far from denying the justness of his observation, she had been almost flattered. Her mouth was large, and she had little round bright eyes. Her skin was colourless and much disfigured by freckles. Her nose was long and thin. But her face was so kindly, her vivacity so attractive, that no one after ten minutes thought of her ugliness. You noticed then that her hair, though sprinkled with white, was pretty, and that her figure was exceedingly neat. She had good hands, very white and admirably formed, which she waved continually in the fervour of her gesticulation. Now that her means were adequate she took great pains with her dress, and her clothes, though they cost much more than she could afford, were always beautiful. Her taste was so great, her tact so sure, that she was able to make the most of herself. She was determined that if people called her ugly they should be forced in the same breath to confess that she was perfectly gowned.

And, a passage to make feminists explode with outrage pithily sums up the (cramped patriarchal) expectations of the era:

Susie could not prevent the pang that wrung her heart; for she too was capable of love. There was in her a wealth of passionate affection that none had sought to find. None had ever whispered in her ears the charming nonsense that she read in books. She recognised that she had no beauty to help her, but once she had at least the charm of vivacious youth. That was gone now, and the freedom to go into the world had come too late; yet her instinct told her that she was made to be a decent man’s wife and the mother of children.

It is fascinating, chilling, informative, amazing, that at age 30, Susie considers herself an old maid, a spinster, over the hill and on the shelf. It is a vivid insight into social history.

Anyway, Susie plays the well-worn role of friend and confidante to the heroine and secret admirer of the hero. It’s a similar role to that played by Miss Ley in Maugham’s second novel Mrs Craddock, and in just the same way that Miss Ley comments sardonically and insightfully into the story of Bertha and Jim in that marriage, so Susie, at least initially, finds everything in the earnest love affair of Arthur and Margaret funny and mockable.

(In a tiny grace not, a ‘Miss Ley’ is mentioned in the letter written to Arthur from a friend who knew Haddo at Oxford: the letter describes the dark rumours which described the man even as a student, but it is this casual reference to a ‘Miss Ley’ which makes the Maugham fan’s ears prick up and wonder whether, at one stage, he was going to create an overlapping universe of characters appearing across all his novels. Intriguing thought. Instead of a Marvel Comic Universe, a Maugham Character Universe. To some extent he did do this, with the character of ‘William Ashenden’ narrating both the novel Cakes and Ale and figuring as the protagonist of the spy short stories, Ashenden. Similarly, several of the novels are set in north Kent (where Maugham himself grew up), town of Whitstable appearing in several novels renamed ‘Blackstable.’)

Anyway, alongside these good character, there is the villain, Haddo, whose main characteristic is his gross fatness:

He was a man of great size, two or three inches more than six feet high; but the most noticeable thing about him was a vast obesity. His paunch was of imposing dimensions. His face was large and fleshy. He had thrown himself into the arrogant attitude of Velasquez’s portrait of Del Borro in the Museum of Berlin; and his countenance bore of set purpose the same contemptuous smile.

And:

He was clearly not old, though his corpulence added to his apparent age. His features were good, his ears small, and his nose delicately shaped. He had big teeth, but they were white and even. His mouth was large, with heavy moist lips. He had the neck of a bullock. His dark, curling hair had retreated from the forehead and temples in such a way as to give his clean-shaven face a disconcerting nudity. The baldness of his crown was vaguely like a tonsure. He had the look of a very wicked, sensual priest.

Big, fat and evil, Haddo is designed to send shivers of horror through the reader and, as the book proceeds, does so very effectively.

Having created and described these characters in great detail, what does Maugham do with them?

The plot

Through a series of carefully orchestrated events, Haddo becomes an increasing and insidious presence in the lives of the young couple. It is on Arthur’s very first night in Paris that Margaret and Susie take him to Le Chien Noir where he is introduced to the gallery of bohemians, and into which Haddo erupts, fat and grandiloquent and ridiculous and spooky.

At first, as Haddo tells a series of preposterous stories about what a wonderful big game hunter and mountain climber he is to the audience of poets and painters at Le Chien Noir, he is met with mockery and scorn.

But it isn’t long before the theme of magic is raised and Haddo prompted to tell at length the lives of the famous magicians and alchemists of old – Paracelsus, Raymon Lull et al. (Contemporary critics of the novel drew attention to these factual passages, pointing out that they felt like they had been cut and pasted out of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Maugham candidly admits in his introduction to spending weeks in the British Museum researching the background. I like medieval history and the voodoo feel of the medieval and early Renaissance intellectual world, its domination by powers and thrones and hugely complex theological models, so I enjoyed the atmosphere of flickering candles in darkened cellars, and mystic shapes drawn on the floor and ritual incantations.)

Haddo intersperses stories about the alchemists with tales of his own encounters with strange men and women who possess second sight, the ability to control animals and to conjure spirits. Helping to reinforce all this, Dr Porhoët chips in, mostly sceptical but admitting that, during his time in Egypt, he also witnessed strange and unaccountable events.

‘I have seen many things in the East which are inexplicable by the known processes of science.’

The same night, after eating at the bar, Haddo ends up tagging along with Susie, Arthur and Margaret to a fair ‘held at the Lion de Belfort’ in Montparnasse. There then follow a sequence of spooky events. Haddo lays his hands on the mane of the horse which pulls the cab they go to the fair in, and the horse starts whinnying and shivering in fear. As soon as he removes his hand, the horse stops. At the fair they visit a scruffy booth presided over by an oriental woman who has a weird control over the snakes she tends.

The role of Dr Porhoët

Throughout these scenes the core trio of Arthur, Margaret and Susie are generally accompanied by Dr Porhoët. It becomes clear that his function in the book is to provide a plausible support for Haddo’s supernatural stories. If Haddo had been the only one talking about the Zohar and the Clavicula Salomonis and the Pseudomonarchia Daemonorum of Wierus and the Grimoire of Honorius and the Hexameron of Torquemada and the Tableau de l’Inconstance des Démons, by Delancre and Delrio’s Disquisitiones Magicae he would have been isolated and much less believable. But Maugham has given Dr Porhoët a career in Egypt so that he can have him witness umpteen weird oriental scenes, have Porhoët backing up and reinforcing many of Haddo’s claims.

A few days later, when the trio visit Dr Porhoët’s apartment, they discover it to be lined from floor to ceiling with leather-bound ancient volumes by all the great masters of the dark arts. While Porhoët isn’t himself a magician and is drily ironic about most of the ‘learning’ contained in his books, he does have one or two stories of weird and inexplicable events he saw occur during his time in Egypt…

So Dr Porhoët is like a straight man to Haddo’s dark magician, not quite believing in magic but helping to establish the fact that there is a vast body of writings on the subject, and that, maybe, you know, there’s something to it… Thus he and Haddo are shown having learned conversations about the old magicians, alchemists and their texts. This dramatic to and fro, spiced with Porhoët’s scepticism, is much more persuasive than if Maugham had had Haddo just give long monologues covering the same material.

Dr Porhoët is Haddo’s enabler. He is the door which lets Haddo in. Dr Porhoët’s testimony makes Haddo’s belief in ancient magic much more believable. If a man of science who is basically a sceptic believes some of these stories, then maybe…

The crisis of the plot

Out of politeness, after the fair outing, Margaret invites Haddo a few days later to come to tea.

Part one of this tea party is another long disquisition between Haddo and Dr Porhoët, touching on the lives and works of Paracelsus, Hermes Trismegistus and Albertus Magnus. It builds up to the long and vivid story of how Paracelsus created and nurtured ten little homunculi or spirits in jars. Silly though it sounds, the telling, amid plenty of detail, and horror-stricken intensity, creates a real atmosphere.

The story ended, Dr Porhoët rises to leave the little party and disaster strikes. Margaret’s little pet dog, which had started whining and gone to hide in a corner when Haddo first arrived, now inexplicably springs at him and bites Haddo in the hand. Without thinking, Haddo brutally kicks the dog right across the room at which Margaret screams and Arthur – who has met all of Haddo’s stories with mockery and disbelief – punches him full in the face then, while he is on the ground, kicks him again and again.

For the usually sedate and restrained Maugham, this is a shocking scene. While they all turn their attention to the dog, Haddo staggers to his feet, where he makes a dignified apology for his behaviour, bows and leaves the apartment. But not before Susie has seen a look of implacable demonic hatred on his face!

Haddo’s campaign of seduction

Next day Margaret encounters Haddo in the street. The fat man promptly stumbles and collapses. Passersby say he is having a heart attack. Margaret is forced to take him into her apartment, despite her misgivings, to rest, give him a glass of water etc. She is full of dislike but her good manners prevail.

This is a bad mistake because Haddo proceeds to seduce Margaret, but not in a sexual sense, something far worse. He entrances her somehow. He is meek and apologetic, he begs forgiveness, she finds herself touched by the tears in his eyes, she finds herself noticing the beauty of his lips and face. He recites Walter Pater’s famous description of the Mona Lisa and then goes on to spin flowery prose poetry about other paintings, paintings characterised by dark atmosphere and unknown sins… the whole thing sounding very much like the purple prose used by Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray – paintings, art, strange moods, rare emotions, unknown pleasures and so on…

When he commands her to listen to him playing the piano she follows and sits meekly, aware that she can do no other. He has somehow hypnotised her into admiration and submission. He doesn’t take advantage of her body. Much more insidiously, she finds him entering her heart and affections.

Haddo performs magic. He scatters a pinch of blue powder onto a bowl of water and, behold! the water burns up and disappears. Haddo elaborates a fantasy in which he scatters enough blue powder over the world to burn up the oceans!

He then scatters dried leaves over the fire to produce a pungent smoke which he tells Margaret to inhale deeply. He takes her hand and suddenly they are transported to a barren cross-roads in a bleak landscape of burnt heather where Margaret sees a sort of witches’ sabbath.

Margaret’s gaze was riveted upon a great, ruined tree that stood in that waste place, alone, in ghastly desolation; and though a dead thing, it seemed to suffer a more than human pain. The lightning had torn it asunder, but the wind of centuries had sought in vain to drag up its roots. The tortured branches, bare of any twig, were like a Titan’s arms, convulsed with intolerable anguish. And in a moment she grew sick with fear, for a change came into the tree, and the tremulousness of life was in it; the rough bark was changed into brutish flesh and the twisted branches into human arms. It became a monstrous, goat-legged thing, more vast than the creatures of nightmare. She saw the horns and the long beard, the great hairy legs with their hoofs, and the man’s rapacious hands. The face was horrible with lust and cruelty, and yet it was divine. It was Pan, playing on his pipes, and the lecherous eyes caressed her with a hideous tenderness. But even while she looked, as the mist of early day, rising, discloses a fair country, the animal part of that ghoulish creature seemed to fall away, and she saw a lovely youth, titanic but sublime, leaning against a massive rock. He was more beautiful than the Adam of Michelangelo who wakes into life at the call of the Almighty; and, like him freshly created, he had the adorable languor of one who feels still in his limbs the soft rain on the loose brown earth. Naked and full of majesty he lay, the outcast son of the morning; and she dared not look upon his face, for she knew it was impossible to bear the undying pain that darkened it with ruthless shadows. Impelled by a great curiosity, she sought to come nearer, but the vast figure seemed strangely to dissolve into a cloud; and immediately she felt herself again surrounded by a hurrying throng. Then came all legendary monsters and foul beasts of a madman’s fancy; in the darkness she saw enormous toads, with paws pressed to their flanks, and huge limping scarabs, shelled creatures the like of which she had never seen, and noisome brutes with horny scales and round crabs’ eyes, uncouth primeval things, and winged serpents, and creeping animals begotten of the slime. She heard shrill cries and peals of laughter and the terrifying rattle of men at the point of death. Haggard women, dishevelled and lewd, carried wine; and when they spilt it there were stains like the stains of blood. And it seemed to Margaret that a fire burned in her veins, and her soul fled from her body; but a new soul came in its place, and suddenly she knew all that was obscene. She took part in some festival of hideous lust, and the wickedness of the world was patent to her eyes. She saw things so vile that she screamed in terror, and she heard Oliver laugh in derision by her side. It was a scene of indescribable horror, and she put her hands to her eyes so that she might not see.

It is preposterous like all horror stories but, if you give yourself permission, if you read sympathetically and let your imagination go, many passages of the book are genuinely visionary and creepy.

All this has taken place on this one visit to her flat prompted when she saw him stumble and collapse in the street. Now Haddo finally leaves, and Margaret comes back to herself. But over the following days she finds herself thinking of him more and more. Haddo had scribbled down his address before he departed and now Margaret finds herself drawn to go and see him, despite her better judgement.

Susie returns from the studio. Arthur arrives and takes Margaret in his arms – but she is changed utterly, and walks and talks as in a daze.

The wrong marriage

Long story short – Margaret makes excuses to Susie and lies to Arthur and starts to visit Haddo every afternoon. He shows her more of the Dark Side, explaining more foul mysteries and mysterious sins.

If this was a modern movie I might have expected them to have sex, the camera lingering on the sight of the enormous repulsive slug-like magician ravishing the slender beautiful Margaret in a variety of pornographic postures.

However, two things appear to have restrained Maugham from going down this route. One was the censorship of his day, which was smothering. A whole raft of publishers refused to publish Mrs Craddock simply because it merely depicts feelings of arousal and lust. Any hint of actual physical sex would have gotten it banned. (It was a real eye-opener to me to learn just how much Maugham, generally portrayed as a reactionary and second-rate writer, in fact played a progressive role in pushing at the limits of censorship. Nonetheless, there was a definite line he could not cross.)

But reason two is that it will become important to the plot that Margaret remain a virgin.

Thus, all the time that ‘sensible’ Margaret is making plans for her wedding to Arthur, naming the day, choosing the dress, the cake and so on – ‘possessed’ Margaret is secretly seeing Haddo and, to the reader’s horror and amazement, agreeing to marry him! She is overcome with horror and revulsion but unable to stop herself.

On the day that she and Arthur were due to catch the boat train from Paris back to London to get married, Margaret sends a note to Susie to say that she has married Haddo and left town.

Flabbergasted, Susie spends a day visiting Margaret’s dressmaker, Haddo’s apartment and the British Embassy, establishing the truth of the story – before she tells Arthur, who is, as you might expect, absolutely devastated.

Thus Haddo wreaks the revenge on Arthur that Susie had read on his face, on that fateful day when Haddo had kicked the dog, and Arthur knocked him to the ground. Revenge!

Haddo and Margaret’s peregrinations

Arthur returns to London where he throws himself into his work, taking two jobs, delivering lectures and editing a big book of surgery in order to try and blot out his intense emotional pain.

Susie takes up an invitation from a friend to go and stay in Italy for the winter. In the spring she passes on to the Riviera. In both places she discovers Haddo and Margaret have been staying, behaving scandalously. Haddo gambles intensely, getting Margaret to lay the bets at the tables. They have high society parties but these tend to be ruined by Haddo’s caddish behaviour – he cheats at cards, he tries to pass forged money – and he is blackballed and cold shouldered by Society.

In Monte Carlo, Susie witnesses Margaret gambling and then shudders with horror as she sees the once-innocent and pure Margaret smile acquaintance with a notorious courtesan. Into what depths of sin has Haddo dragged her!!

Susie returns to London, and meets with Arthur a few times. What Arthur doesn’t realise is that Susie is passionately in love with him. It gives an added intensity to the story that Susie loves Arthur with a pure disinterested love which she knows can never be returned because of Arthur’s total commitment to Margaret.

They go to the opera (music, Susie realises, is a drug Arthur uses to help transport him away from his pain at Margaret’s desertion) and bump into an acquaintance of Arthur’s who invites them to make up a dinner at the Savoy.

Here they are horrified to discover that two of the other dinner guests are Haddo and Margaret. Margaret behaves coldly and disdainfully to Arthur, while Haddo politely but cruelly mocks Arthur at every opportunity in the conversation. And Susie has to sit watching her beloved suffer, wincing at every one of Haddo’s cruel jibes.

They abduct Margaret

Convinced that Margaret is not happy but somehow hypnotised by the obese bully, Arthur goes to the Savoy the next day and, after a long pleading conversation in which Margaret reveals that she is unhappy, abducts her – marching her out of the room, into a hansom cab, directing it to Euston and fleeing to the country.

There then follows a chapter where Arthur tries, with Susie’s help, to detoxify Margaret. Maugham explains the type of late Victorian divorce which they will arrange for her. But when Arthur returns to London to resume his work and organise the divorce, Margaret becomes more and more restless, and one day Susie goes into her room to find she’s left. She has returned to Haddo.

Arthur goes to Haddo’s country house

Susie, by now convinced that Haddo’s hold over Margaret really is irrational and magical, travels back to Paris to see Dr Porhoët. This is an opportunity for Maugham to give us more learned tales of how ancient magicians exerted power and control over their victims (designed to reinforce the plausibility of the situation).

A few weeks later, Arthur turns up in Paris and tells Susie a long story about how he has visited Haddo’s country seat. (Apart from everything else, Haddo is posh; he went to Eton and Oxford and is heir to a big estate in Staffordshire, named Skene.)

Arthur stayed at the local inn and then walked through the bleak and blasted countryside to Skene, to discover that it is a spooky old Gothic house. It is protected by a fence surrounding the grounds. Arthur finds a loose plank, wriggles it loose and and – in an effectively chilling sequence – stumbles through a dark wood to a clearing with a bench.

After a while (in a spectacularly convenient coincidence) Margaret comes and sits at this very bench. When Arthur walks out in front of her, she initially thinks Arthur is a phantom and explains to Arthur that she knows Haddo is carrying out all kinds of black magic in the house.

She quite calmly tells Arthur that she thinks Haddo is going to kill her, using her in some black magic ritual. Terrified, Arthur pleads for her to come with him but she wriggles free and says No, Haddo will punish her if he knew she was speaking to Arthur, she must go she must go now — and runs off into the pitch blackness of the woods.

Arthur searches through the grounds for her but fail, gives up, then retraces his footsteps to the hole in the fence, walks back to the local inn, gets a cab ride the next day to the station, catches the train to London, catches to boat train to Paris and is now standing in front of Susie and Porhoët telling them this narrative.

As it happens, Susie and Dr Porhoët had just been having another one of those conversations about black magic and speculating on Haddo’s motives. Now Susie remembers one of the many black rumours about Haddo that she had heard in Monte Carlo.

‘They said there that he was attempting to make living creatures by a magical operation.’ She glanced at the doctor, but spoke to Arthur. ‘Just before you came in, our friend was talking of that book of Paracelsus in which he speaks of feeding the monsters he has made on human blood.’
Arthur gave a horrified cry. (Chapter 13)

Susie persuades the by-now distraught Arthur to accompany her for a few days to Chartres to calm his nerves. But one day he rushes into her room convinced that something has happened to Margaret. How? Why? He can’t explain it. Even staid, boring, unimaginative Arthur is now caught up in the atmosphere of magic and irrationality.

Back to England, back to Skene

They rush back to Paris, co-opt Dr Porhoët (what a hectic retirement he’s turning out to have!), catch the next boat train to London (‘Susie never forgot the horror of that journey to England’), catch a cab to Euston, catch the train to Staffordshire, catch a cab to the local inn at the village of Venning, and hear from the innkeeper’s nosy wife that, Yes, Mr Haddo’s beautiful wife passed away earlier that week. The funeral had taken place the previous day.

Arthur is even more distraught. He takes the others to confront the local doctor, slow-minded provincial Dr Richardson, who blandly claims that Margaret died of heart disease. Infuriated at the man’s obtuseness, Arthur lets fly a stream of insults and abuse before storming out. He tells Susie he has a plan. (For a moment I thought he might have been planning to dig up Margaret’s coffin – which would have made for a grim and compelling scene. But no…)

Instead, he plans to break into Haddo’s house. Arthur drags Susie and Dr Porhoët along with him to the gates of Skene House, pushes past the outraged gatekeeper, bangs on the front door, and loudly demands admission from the stroppy doorkeeper. While they’re bickering on the doorstep, Haddo himself appears, more physically repulsive than ever.

Dr Porhoët, who had not seen him for some time, was astounded at the change which had taken place in him. The corpulence which had been his before was become now a positive disease. He was enormous. His chin was a mass of heavy folds distended with fat, and his cheeks were puffed up so that his eyes were preternaturally small. He peered at you from between the swollen lids. All his features had sunk into that hideous obesity. His ears were horribly bloated, and the lobes were large and swelled. He had apparently a difficulty in breathing, for his large mouth, with its scarlet, shining lips, was constantly open. He had grown much balder and now there was only a crescent of long hair stretching across the back of his head from ear to ear. There was something terrible about that great shining scalp. His paunch was huge; he was a very tall man and held himself erect, so that it protruded like a vast barrel. His hands were infinitely repulsive; they were red and soft and moist. He was sweating freely, and beads of perspiration stood on his forehead and on his shaven lip. (Chapter 14)

Haddo simply brushes off their concerns and accusations. Margaret died of a heart attack, the local doctor says so. If Arthur attacks him, Haddo, now, in the doorway of his house in front of witnesses, he will be compelled to report it to the village constable.

Incensed with frustration Arthur turns on his heel and marches back down the drive with the other two lamely following in his wake.

And now there comes a genuinely unexpected plot development: Arthur – cool, phlegmatic, Anglo-Saxon, rational scientist Arthur – asks Dr Porhoët to raise Margaret’s ghost from the dead!

Without his books, and relying on memory, given just a day to buy the basic ingredients from the local store, Porhoët, against all expectations, but in accordance with the book’s by-now dream logic, manages to do this.

Out on the blasted heath which surrounds Skene House, miles from any other people, at night, Porhoët arranges bowls, burns incense and commences reciting magic spells.

Inexplicably, a sudden terror seized Susie. She felt that the hairs of her head stood up, and a cold sweat broke out on her body. Her limbs had grown on an instant inconceivably heavy so that she could not move. A panic such as she had never known came upon her, and, except that her legs would not carry her, she would have fled blindly. She began to tremble. She tried to speak, but her tongue clave to her throat.

Margaret doesn’t appear like the ghost of Hamlet’s father – in the same shape as in life, and clearly commanding revenge. Instead, much more piteously, they at first only hear her, hear the sound of a woman weeping uncontrollably.

And then, seeming to come out of nothingness, extraordinarily, they heard with a curious distinctness the sound of a woman weeping. Susie’s heart stood still. They heard the sound of a woman weeping, and they recognized the voice of Margaret. A groan of anguish burst from Arthur’s lips, and he was on the point of starting forward. But quickly Dr Porhoët put out his hand to prevent him. The sound was heartrending, the sobbing of a woman who had lost all hope, the sobbing of a woman terrified. If Susie had been able to stir, she would have put her hands to her ears to shut out the ghastly agony of it.

And in a moment, notwithstanding the heavy darkness of the starless night, Arthur saw her. She was seated on the stone bench as when last he had spoken with her. In her anguish she sought not to hide her face. She looked at the ground, and the tears fell down her cheeks. Her bosom heaved with the pain of her weeping.

Then Arthur knew that all his suspicions were justified.

Fiery climax

The die is cast. In the long final chapter two things happen: the fight and the storming of the old house.

Several days go by while Arthur goes for long walks in the countryside and Susie and Dr Porhoët worry about him. One afternoon the sultry air is growing heavy with a storm when Arthur returns to the inn. It is getting dark as Susie and Dr Porhoët beg Arthur to tell them what his plan is. He tells them. He is going to kill Haddo.

As he utters these words, the wind in the darkness outside rises to a howl and then the lamp in the room they’re in is suddenly extinguished. In the darkness they all realise that someone else is in the room with them. Reading this at night I found it genuinely scary. A huge black shape fills a corner and without a word Arthur flings himself on it, identifying arms and head and neck, rolling over, struggling, fighting for a grip.

Arthur seized the huge bullock throat and dug his fingers into it, and they sunk into the heavy rolls of fat; and he flung the whole weight of his body into them.

Arthur fights to the death in the pitch blackness, breaking the thing’s arm and then strangling it to death. He staggers to his feet. ‘I’ve killed him,’ he says hoarsely. Except that, when Susie lights a candle with the rasp of a match… the room is empty. There is nothing there!

When so much of the dialogue and behaviour is polite, restrained and civilised – these scenes of sudden bestial violence are all the more striking.

Arthur insists that they must go, go now, go immediately to Skene. And so he force marches Susie and Dr Porhoët the three or so miles from the inn to the fence of the old Gothic pile. He breaks in through the broken fence. He bangs on the door but there is no answer. They know from the gossipy landlady of the inn that the servants are sent away at night so, confident that the house is empty save for Haddo, Arthur breaks into a ground floor window then comes to the front door to unlock it and let the other two in.

Room by room they then search the house, finding half of it abandoned and cold. They search two floors then are stymied about how to get up to the upper floor, the only rooms which they saw lit up from the outside. Arthur finds a secret passage concealed behind the wood panelling.

Up they go and discover – chambers of horrors! Three long rooms which are a) dazzlingly lit b) immensely hot, warmed by open furnaces. There is a lengthy description of all the alchemical equipment Haddo had gathered and was using, but the climax of the entire novel comes with the revelation of a series of glass bowls in which Haddo had been experimenting… to create humans, to create human life. This goes far beyond the tales of the homunculi created by Paracelsus and into a world of creating and moulding human beings which is reminiscent of H.G. Wells’s horrifying fantasy of a decade earlier, The Island of Dr Moreau.

All of Maugham’s habitual taste and decorum is thrown to the winds as he describes, at nauseating length, a series of half-human abortions and monstrous lumps which are kept in the glass basins, palpitating, or writhing or scuttling on deformed limbs.

As a modern reader, who has read about (and seen in umpteen movies) inventive descriptions of disgusting things – I still found the descriptions sickening. God knows what contemporary Edwardian readers must have made of them.

In another [bowl] the trunk was almost like that of a human child, except that it was patched strangely with red and grey. But the terror of it was that at the neck it branched hideously, and there were two distinct heads, monstrously large, but duly provided with all their features. The features were a caricature of humanity so shameful that one could hardly bear to look. And as the light fell on it, the eyes of each head opened slowly. They had no pigment in them, but were pink, like the eyes of white rabbits; and they stared for a moment with an odd, unseeing glance. Then they were shut again, and what was curiously terrifying was that the movements were not quite simultaneous; the eyelids of one head fell slowly just before those of the other.

And then, over in a corner, they see the vast body of Haddo, lying dead, strangled with protruding eyes and tongue. His arm is broken, as Arthur broke the fat body he fought with in the blackout at the hotel. Somehow, by some magic which we are now totally prepared to believe, Haddo transported his body, or a version of himself, to the hotel room, and Arthur, killing the phantasm there, also killed the host body back here.

‘Out, out,’ cries Arthur, ‘We must leave now,’ and hustles them out of the rooms and down the stairs. Aren’t you coming? cries Susie. ‘In a moment,’ he replies. Moments later he rejoins them at the front door. They run down the drive, then detour into the dark wood, find the hole in the fence and walk the long way back towards the inn.

Dawn comes as they approach the inn. Susie feels an enormous sense of life and colour returning to the landscape. And then she realises there is red in the west too. Arthur had set Skene alight. Now it is blazing out of control. The old Gothic ruin, along with the body of its black magician master and the horror of the creatures he made, will all be wiped from the face of the earth.

Arthur puts his arm around Susie to support her and she suddenly feels safe and protected. The warm sun rises over the rejuvenated landscape. All will be well.

The pleasures of the text

Entertainment

Although it’s a preposterous story told in often lurid and over-wrought prose, it is still, like most of Maugham, immensely entertaining and readable.

Escapism

There’s the obvious escape any story offers, namely of escaping your present-day concerns into a world where you are able to understand all the characters and what is going on – where the stories have neat beginnings, middles and ends – all so very unlike the experience of messy, complicated and often inexplicable life that most of us experience.

There’s also the pleasure of escape into another era, the Downton Abbey syndrome. There are different clothes (for women an amazing array of rich costumes, gowns, cloaks, dresses, and hats – lots of hats – and fine jewellery). There is the way the streets of London, Paris or the towns they visit are not clogged and poisoned by cars, lorries, buses, taxis and other sources of poisonous toxic fumes.

And, something I noticed in Maugham’s novel Mrs Craddock as well as here – all the characters take it for granted that they can just swan off abroad whenever they feel like it. We are told that Arthur is a busy surgeon at a leading hospital but he can not only pop over to Paris for weeks at a time, but go gallivanting off to Chartres, or spend the latter part of the novel running off to Staffordshire, at will. I wish I had that kind of job.

Even more I wish I led the life of Susie. On the one hand the modern feminist reader might be horrified at the way she – and presumably the society around her – consider her an old maid on the shelf at age 30, and might object to the rather harsh way in which Maugham repeatedly emphasises the plainness of her looks, verging on ugliness.

But on the upside – she doesn’t have to work! As far as I can tell she has no job because she enjoys a modest allowance. This means she spends all day strolling round Paris, visiting galleries, having little tea parties and, when Margaret goes off with Haddo, she simply accepts an invitation from a friend to go and stay in Rome for the winter, where she visits the opera, goes out for dinner, strolls round the galleries. When she gets bored of that, she moves on to the Riviera for spring. Some oppression!

Manners

Everyone is so polite. It is lovely to dip for a while into the decorum and manners of a long lost era. Sure, it acted as a terrible restraint on people’s feelings – for example, it is made very clear that Arthur suffers immensely because he feels he cannot speak openly to anyone about his anguish over Margaret – but the general level of exquisite politeness at almost every level of society is wonderfully remote from the everyday rudeness and curtness of our own times.

And you have to enter into this world of exquisite manners in order to understand, and enjoy, when they are being deliberately manipulated by the characters. For example, it is one of Haddo’s entertaining (shocking) traits that he combines wicked heartlessness with the most polished manners, twisting the emotional knife into Arthur with the politest words and most refined diction.

Take the scene where our trio barge their way up to the front door of Skene House to find the truth about Margaret’s death. When Haddo appears he behaves with provocative good manners, the soul of politesse.

‘I have come about Margaret’s death,’ said Arthur.
Haddo, as was his habit, did not immediately answer. He looked slowly from Arthur to Dr Porhoët, and from Dr Porhoët to Susie. His eyes rested on her hat, and she felt uncomfortably that he was inventing some gibe about it.
‘I should have thought this hardly the moment to intrude upon my sorrow,’ he said at last. ‘If you have condolences to offer, I venture to suggest that you might conveniently send them by means of the penny post.’

In the midst of all the horror, Maugham makes Haddo the source of wonderfully cynical jibes, clothed in his immensely lofty Eton-Oxford-aristocratic refinement. Here is Arthur shouting at Haddo, and Haddo fending him off with unimpeachable civility.

‘I saw Margaret three weeks ago, and she told me that she went in terror of her life.’
‘Poor Margaret! She had always the romantic temperament. I think it was that which first brought us together.’
‘You damned scoundrel!’ cried Arthur.
‘My dear fellow, pray moderate your language. This is surely not an occasion when you should give way to your lamentable taste for abuse. You outrage all Miss Boyd’s susceptibilities.’ He turned to her with an airy wave of his fat hand. ‘You must forgive me if I do not offer you the hospitality of Skene, but the loss I have so lately sustained does not permit me to indulge in the levity of entertaining.’

Well, if you’re going to be a black magician confronted by the fiancé of the woman you stole from him and subsequently murdered as part of your fiendish experiments – this is the style to do it in.

The movie

The Magician was made into a fabulously melodramatic black-and-white silent film in 1926, directed by Rex Ingram.

Somerset Maugham’s books

1897 Liza of Lambeth
1902 Mrs Craddock
1908 The Magician
1915 Of Human Bondage
1919 The Moon and Sixpence

1921 The Trembling of a Leaf: Little Stories of the South Sea Islands (short story collection)
1921 The Circle (play)
1922 On a Chinese Screen (travel book)
1923 Our Betters (play)
1925 The Painted Veil (novel)
1926 The Casuarina Tree: Six Stories
1927 The Constant Wife (play)
1928 Ashenden: Or the British Agent (short story collection)
1929 The Sacred Flame (play)

1930 Cakes and Ale: or, the Skeleton in the Cupboard
1930 The Gentleman in the Parlour: A Record of a Journey From Rangoon to Haiphong
1931 Six Stories Written in the First Person Singular (short story collection)
1932 The Narrow Corner (novel)
1933 Ah King (short story collection)
1933 Sheppey (play)
1935 Don Fernando (travel book)
1936 Cosmopolitans (29 x two-page-long short stories)
1937 Theatre (novel)
1938 The Summing Up (autobiography)
1939 Christmas Holiday (novel)

1940 The Mixture as Before (short story collection)
1941 Up at the Villa (crime novella)
1942 The Hour Before The Dawn (novel)
1944 The Razor’s Edge (novel)
1946 Then and Now (historical novel)
1947 Creatures of Circumstance (short story collection)
1948 Catalina (historical novel)
1949 A Writer’s Notebook

1963 Collected short stories volume one (30 stories: Rain, The Fall of Edward Barnard, Honolulu, The Luncheon, The Ant and the Grasshopper, Home, The Pool, Mackintosh, Appearance and Reality, The Three Fat Women of Antibes, The Facts of Life, Gigolo and Gigolette, The Happy Couple, The Voice of the Turtle, The Lion’s Skin, The Unconquered, The Escape, The Judgement Seat, Mr. Know-All, The Happy Man, The Romantic Young Lady, The Point of Honour, The Poet, The Mother, A Man from Glasgow, Before the Party, Louise, The Promise, A String of Beads, The Yellow Streak)
1963 Collected short stories volume two (24 stories: The Vessel of Wrath, The Force of Circumstance, Flotsam and Jetsam, The Alien Corn, The Creative Impulse, The Man with the Scar, Virtue, The Closed Shop, The Bum, The Dream, The Treasure, The Colonel’s Lady, Lord Mountdrago, The Social Sense, The Verger, In A Strange Land, The Taipan, The Consul, A Friend in Need, The Round Dozen, The Human Element, Jane, Footprints in the Jungle, The Door of Opportunity)
1963 Collected short stories volume three (17 stories: A Domiciliary Visit, Miss King, The Hairless Mexican, The Dark Woman, The Greek, A Trip to Paris, Giulia Lazzari, The Traitor, Gustav, His Excellency, Behind the Scenes, Mr Harrington’s Washing, A Chance Acquaintance, Love and Russian Literature, Sanatorium)
1963 Collected short stories volume four (30 stories: The Book-Bag, French Joe, German Harry, The Four Dutchmen, The Back Of Beyond, P. & O., Episode, The Kite, A Woman Of Fifty, Mayhew, The Lotus Eater, Salvatore, The Wash-Tub, A Man With A Conscience, An Official Position, Winter Cruise, Mabel, Masterson, Princess September, A Marriage Of Convenience, Mirage, The Letter, The Outstation, The Portrait Of A Gentleman, Raw Material, Straight Flush, The End Of The Flight, A Casual Affair, Red, Neil Macadam)

2009 The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham by Selina Hastings

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by Simon on October 14, 2018 • Permalink

Posted in Adventure, Books, Fantasy, Horror, Novel

Posted by Simon on October 14, 2018

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Mrs Craddock by Somerset Maugham (1902)

‘Entre deux amants il-y-a toujours un qui aime, et un qui se laisse aimer.’

After the success of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth in 1897, the 23-year-old William Somerset Maugham optimistically abandoned his career as a trainee doctor to become a professional writer. Later in life, Maugham considered this to have been a bad mistake, for literary success came only slowly and he spent nearly a decade churning out ten novels which sold little or poorly.

All the time his real ambition was to be a playwright, but none of his plays were accepted either. It was only in 1907, ten years after Liza, that his play Lady Frederick was finally staged and, to his own surprise, became a runaway success, transforming his reputation and fortunes. Within a year he had four plays running in the West End and had arrived.

Mrs Craddock

Mrs Craddock, from 1902, is a product of his lean early years, and you can see why. It is a long and uneven narrative, sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, covering ten or so years in the life of Bertha Leys:

from when she is a head-strong, romantic orphan under the guardianship of her aunt Mary living in the family home, Court Leys in Kent
through her infatuation for and marriage to the virile local farmer Edward Craddock
her slow realisation that Edward is conventional, unimaginative and boring and cares more about his wretched cows and pet dogs than about Bertha’s feelings
(something she starts to suspect on their honeymoon in London where he laughs at crude vaudeville and can’t see the point of the art galleries which Bertha adores)
she is mortified when he humiliates her at tennis at a big party of the local gentry
she hopes that getting pregnant and having a child will bring them close together again, or at least provide a focus for her thwarted love
but, inevitably, she has a long, drawn-out miscarriage and the baby is still-born
worse than anything is the calm, sensible way Edward accepts this and its corollary, the doctor’s conclusion that she will never again be able to have children – news at which Bertha is, understandably, distraught (chapter 17)
their married life becomes a series of niggling arguments – like the one about whether the farm workmen should chop down some beech trees which overshadow an important field (Edward) or should not, because they are old and beautiful (Bertha)
these escalate into flaring rows and, slowly, Bertha is forced to admit that she can no longer stand her husband
so she leaves Edward and Kent to go travelling with Aunt Mary on the Continent for months
on her return to London she has an ill-advised but madly passionate fling with a distant cousin, Gerald Vaudrey
but when, after torments of separation, and even mad thoughts about going with him to the New World, Gerald finally leaves for New York, Bertha’s spirit snaps and she returns to Court Leys emotionally empty

Ironically, throughout the novel, as Bertha’s love for him dwindles and dies, we watch as Edward’s career has gone from strength to strength. He manages the Ley property superbly, making a hefty profit and buying up surrounding land, restoring the house, building a tennis court in the grounds, and becoming the life and soul of local North Kent society.

It’s just a shame that Bertha loathes and detests local North Kent society for its parochialism and small-minded snobbery. In the final chapters of the book Bertha and Edward live together but utterly separate in spirit. Bertha, bored out of her mind, walks the local countryside, watches the changing seasons, goes down to the sea and stares for hours at its endless waves, dreaming of escape, dreaming sometimes of suicide or some kind of painless dissolution, anything to make the dreary routine of morning, noon and night, boring dinners with her husband or dreary visits to the local vicar or other landowners, all go away.

Then Edward, stubborn and confident to the end, goes out riding on a horse which has already thrown him once and broken his collarbone. The horse shies at a fence, falling on top of him and he dies. Stunned, Bertha staggers to her bed and reviews her life. Shocked and dismayed, she realises that she is… free!

On the day of the funeral, there is social comedy about who should get order of precedence in the funeral parade among the various organisations Edward which was a leading member of (the freemasons, the county council, the Conservative Party).

But quite separate from all that, Bertha doesn’t attend the funeral. Remote and isolated from the hurly burly of the entire world, she lies on her sofa, in the beautifully restored house, admiring the fine view to the sea, and picks up a book. The End.

Response

I enjoyed reading Mrs Craddock but was aware of its numerous faults. For a start, there are several odd passages where Maugham is being ‘experimental’ (or giving in to contemporary literary fashion) but which really don’t come off.

One of them occurs half way through, when Bertha, still in her infatuation stage, hears tell that Edward is a little injured, and goes off into a peculiar hallucination of him being brought in dead, her washing the corpse, lowering the coffin into the grave and her throwing herself on top of it, a bizarre stream-of-consciousness hallucination – at the end of which Edward walks in right as rain and wondering why she’s in such a state.

The book is also heavily garlanded with over-ripe, purple prose passages describing the Kent countryside or the romantic air of Italy, which go on for pages.

That said, the book has two obvious virtues or strengths:

One is the effectiveness of the social comedy generated by the stiflingly conventional provincial society of Blackstable (the thinly disguised version of Whitstable where Maugham was himself brought up in the 1880s).

The characterisation of the stiff local vicar, Mr Grove, his well-intentioned sister, the hearty doctor, the dashing local landowner Branderton, the chorus of snobbish local ladies led by Mrs Branderston, with Mrs Mayston Ryle and Mrs Molsons not far behind, the scenes involving this little community – are often very funny.

The vicar’s sister, Miss Glover, is a particularly memorable character, all shiny stiff dress and sincere Christian sympathy. Maugham was always strong on social comedy, and strong on the subtleties and veiled malice of petty snobbery. It would later reappear in his feel for the thousand and one stupid restrictions on colonial life in the Far East, as described in his short stories of the 1920s.

Another is Maugham’s knack for beginning or setting his stories in very mundane settings, and often mundane incidents, but from this base working up passages of tremendous emotional intensity which stay with the reader.

Thus, for example, Bertha’s passionate lust and master-worship of Edward are described with real heat, as is her second great infatuation, the sensuality leading to inflamed lust for young Gerald. You can almost smell the sex. Unusual for its day.

Similarly, Bertha’s anger when she realises that Edward doesn’t much care if she lives or dies or what she does, is vividly described and moving.

And so, again, towards the end, is her prolonged mood of depression as she wanders down to the grey Kent sea and fantasises about drowning in it.

So far so good. But whether all these passages really come together to form a convincing description of a plausible personality, such as literature is meant to, I’m not sure.

I’m not sure and I’m also not sure if I’m qualified to judge. For a start, maybe only a woman reader or critic could really assess whether Bertha is a ‘realistic’ character. Who am I to say?

Secondly, the novel covers a period from the 1880s to the end of the 1890s and… that was so long ago, so far away, in a kind of constipated rural Victorian society which is almost impossible for us to imagine, that I can’t see how any modern reader can make a just assessment of its veracity.

What can be confidently made is the criticism that the number two figure in the story – Edward Craddock – never really comes alive. Tall, strong and good-humoured he remains throughout the novel – admittedly putting on weight and growing red-cheeked as the years pass – an unbendingly good, honest, efficient and utterly boring man, the straight man to Bertha’s fireworks display of emotions.

Maybe it’s the failure to bring the man in this novel fully alive which has contributed to it being more or less forgotten.

But what is good, I think, in the novel, is the slow, slow pace at which Maugham describes Bertha’s slow, slow, slow loss of her infatuation, then loss of her love, then her loss of respect for her husband. The book has to be long because its whole point is to describe the very gradual erosion of her love in great detail. In this respect, in the care with which Maugham has plotted the decay of passionate love, I think the novel works.

Sex and lust

Without much by way of introduction or preparation the book launches us straight into the flustered mind of twenty-one-year-old Bertha – living calmly and respectably with her aunt in the family home Court Leys – and her fiercely physical infatuation with the tall, strong, dark local farmer, Edward Craddock who is a tenant farmer on the Ley family land, at Bewlie’s Farm.

He came nearer, a tall fellow of twenty-seven, massively set together, big boned, with long arms and legs, and a magnificent breadth of chest. Bertha recognised the costume that always pleased her, the knickerbockers and gaiters, the Norfolk-jacket of rough tweed, the white stock and the cap – all redolent of the country which for his sake she was beginning to love, and all vigorously masculine. Even the huge boots which covered his feet gave her by their very size a thrill of pleasure; their dimensions suggested a certain firmness of character, a masterfulness, which were intensely reassuring… His cheeks were flushed and his eyes glistened. His vitality was intense, shining out upon others with almost a material warmth.

Although it’s hard for us now to imagine, a number of later writers, in the 1930s and 1940s, paid tribute to the way Maugham broke free of Victorian silence about sex, and wrote with a new openness and candour about passionate, physical love.

This fierce physicality was there right from the start in Maugham’swork, in the powerful descriptions of Liza’s pulse racing and her body swooning against the tall, strong, masculine figure of Jim Blakeston in his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897) – and exactly the same thing is repeated here, as impressionable young Bertha thrills at the touch and swoons against the tall, strong, masculine figure of young Edward.

When he put it round her shoulders, the touch of his hands made her lose the little self-control she had left. A curious spasm passed through her, and she pressed herself closer to him; at the same time his hands sank down, dropping the cloak, and encircled her waist. Then she surrendered herself entirely to his embrace and lifted her face to his. He bent down and kissed her. The kiss was such utter madness that she almost groaned. She could not tell if it was pain or pleasure. She flung her arms round his neck and drew him to her.

When at last he bade her good-bye and shook hands, she blushed again; she was extraordinarily troubled, and as, with his rising, the strong masculine odour of the countryside reached her nostrils, her head whirled.

In a field she saw him, directing some operation. She trembled at the sight, her heart beat very quickly; and when, seeing her, he came forward with a greeting, she turned red and then white in the most compromising fashion. But he was very handsome as, with easy gait, he sauntered to the hedge; above all he was manly, and the pleasing thought passed through Bertha that his strength must be quite herculean. She barely concealed her admiration.

‘I’m rather frightened of you, sometimes,’ she said, laughing. ‘You’re so strong. I feel so utterly weak and helpless beside you.’
‘Are you afraid I shall beat you?’
She looked up at him and then down at the strong hands.
‘I don’t think I should mind if you did. I think I should only love you more.’

‘Let me look at your hands,’ she said. She loved them too. They were large and roughly made, hard with work and exposure, ten times pleasanter, she thought, than the soft hands of the townsman… She stretched out the long, strong fingers. Craddock, knowing her very little, looked with wonder and amusement. She caught his glance, and with a smile bent down to kiss the upturned palms. She wanted to abase herself before the strong man, to be low and humble before him. She would have been his handmaiden, and nothing could have satisfied her so much as to perform for him the most menial services. She knew not how to show the immensity of her passion.

It’s a commonplace enough word but in Maugham’s hands the word ‘thrill’, more nakedly than in other writers of the time, describes the physical impact of sexual arousal and lust.

Even the huge boots which covered his feet gave her by their very size a thrill of pleasure…

Craddock blushed. Bertha noticed it, and a strange little thrill went through her…

He took her hand and the contact thrilled her; her knees were giving way, and she almost tottered.

His letters had caused her an indescribable thrill, the mere sight of his handwriting had made her tremble, and she wanted to see him; she woke up at night with his kisses on her lips.

It gave her a queer thrill to see him turn white when she held his hand, to see him tremble when she leaned on his arm.

It’s a striking paradox that such an externally polite, formal, correctly dressed, well-mannered and self-contained man as Maugham wrote so obsessively and fiercely, throughout his career, of complete sexual abandonment and the heart-stopping power of sheer physical lust.

Never before had she experienced that utter weakness of the knees so that she feared to fall; her breathing was strangely oppressive, and her heart beat almost painfully.

And the candid way he describes the wish to be mastered, dominated, controlled, owned and directed by a powerful strong man.

For the moment Bertha forgot her wayward nature, and wished suddenly to subject herself to his strong guidance. His very strength made her feel curiously weak.

‘Shut your eyes,’ she whispered, and she kissed the closed lids; she passed her lips slowly over his lips, and the soft contact made her shudder and laugh. She buried her face in his clothes, inhaling those masterful scents of the countryside which had always fascinated her.

Later in the book, the same thing happens all over again when she becomes infatuated with Gerald. In the course of that affair there takes place something you don’t usually read about at the period, which is the clearly defined moment when Bertha decides to have sex with Gerald, to give him the great gift of her body, to make their union unique and unforgettable.

You can almost smell the pheromones radiating off the page as Bertha pursues Gerald across London, tracking him down to her aunt’s house, her aunt goes out and they are on the verge of doing something unforgiveable according to Victorian custom (Bertha was still a married woman and keeps telling us that Gerald is almost young enough to be her son) when… there’s a knock at the door and Aunt Mary reappears in the nick of time!

Still. The description of Bertha’s heat and arousal as` she gets so close to her goal is almost pornographic in its blood-heating intensity.

Later, in the 1920s, Maugham met D.H. Lawrence (but then, he met everyone) although they didn’t hit it off. From the limited knowledge I have, I can’t help thinking that this story about a passionate young woman’s lust for a farmer prefigures Lawrence’s novels of love among the haystacks, and I wonder what the younger man thought of the trail Maugham had blazed with his shocking-for-their-time descriptions.

The battle of the sexes

Arguably the central subject of ‘the novel’ since its birth has been the battle of the sexes – to be precise the struggle to find and keep the perfect partner.

The English novel starts in 1748 with Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, a 500-page battle between a man who wants to ravish his servant girl (Pamela) and the said servant girl who insists that they are married before he takes her ‘virtue’. And the rest of ‘serious’ fiction continued to be centred on this theme for at least 150 years – the sly marriage markets of Jane Austen, the earnest character studies of George Eliot, in the American ladies in Europe of Henry James and the Golden Age snobbery of Edith Wharton, through the endless sex war in D.H. Lawrence, eachoed in the love comedies of H.G. Wells or Aldous Huxley, and so on.

Literature which doesn’t address the problem of finding the right partner, and holding onto them i.e. of marriage and adultery, tends not to be thought central to the Great Tradition of the English Novel. Thus ‘serious’ literary critics for a long time refused to admit Sterne, Dickens or Conrad to the ‘canon’.

Love, marriage, infidelity, these are the topics which fill vast warehouses of ‘serious’ literature. Madame Bovary. Anna Karenina.

Mrs Craddock is smack bang in the middle of that tradition for which marriage is the sole interest of human life and, in particular, unhappy marriage. Unhappy, mismatched and ill-fated love turned out to be the central theme of Maugham’s long career.

And Mrs Craddock amounts to an extended early exploration of this theme.

Maugham and women

And at the heart of these mismatched marriages is the women. Maugham throughout his long career had a special sympathy with women. Take imaginative, free-spirited, if naive, Kitty Garstin getting bored of her dull husband in The Painted Veil. Or Mary Panton, unsuitably married to an alcoholic gambler in Up At the Villa and then seriously considering a second (and obviously foolish) marriage to an eminent diplomat twice her age. Or Julia Lambert, famous actress throwing herself away on a worthless young cad in Theatre. Or Liza giving her heart and body to rascally Jim Blakeston instead of decent loyal Tom in Liza of Lambeth. Mismatches, all of them. And women all at the centre of the stories.

In Maugham’s theatrical comedies of manners, there is also a wide array of interesting women characters. There are old and amusingly cynical women (Lady Grayson in Our Betters), younger, powerful women (Constance Middleton in The Constant Woman) and mature, tragic women (Mrs. Tabret in The Sacred Flame).

It is the women, and their often painful emotional journeys, who stick in the reader’s imagination, while the callow young men in these plays are often only dramatic ciphers.

Maugham’s subject is the eternal erring of the human heart, but it is nearly always a woman’s heart which is described, and felt, with greatest intensity.

The New Woman

As if the marriage theme wasn’t already central enough in the literary tradition, the 1890s saw a particular interest in the role and experience of women in contemporary society. It was the era of ‘the New Woman’, and a flurry of novels were published examining the issue of women in society, with narratives and characters being created to explore the rights and wrongs of women.

The term ‘New Woman’ was popularized by British-American writer Henry James, who used it to describe the growth in the number of feminist, educated, independent career women in Europe and the United States. Independence was not simply a matter of the mind: it also involved physical changes in activity and dress, as activities such as bicycling expanded women’s ability to engage with a broader more active world. The New Woman pushed the limits set by a male-dominated society, especially as modeled in the plays of Norwegian Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906). (Wikipedia)

The New Woman was in all the papers, in magazines, in articles, on the stage, discussed in Parliament, aired in a thousand short stories and novels. It even percolated through to the provincial backwater of Blackstable where Mrs Craddock is set, and where clever, cosmopolitan Miss Ley enjoys teasing the hide-bound locals.

‘Which do you think is the predominant partner?’ she asked, smiling drily [referring to Edward and Bertha].
‘The man, as he should be,’ gruffly replied the doctor.
‘Do you think he has more brains?’
‘Ah, you’re a feminist,’ said Dr. Ramsay, with great scorn.

Striking that old fuddy-duddy Dr Ramsay knows what a feminist is and uses the term ‘feminist’ in a story set in the 1880s. Amazing that women were arguing with men about the role of women, and both able to joke and josh about it, some 130 years ago. In that 130 years hundreds of novels, plays, films, thousands of factual books and hundreds of thousands of articles have been written about the New Woman, about feminism, women’s liberation and #metoo.

Quite clearly it is an issue, a real and enormous issue – but one like homelessness and poverty and managing the economy and the North-South divide and how to run the railways, which every generation of intellectuals thinks it has discovered, discusses to death, but which is, somehow, never finally solved.

Boldness about marriage

I mentioned Maugham’s surprising candour in describing the physical characteristics of lust. He makes at least one of his characters be just as scandalously blunt about the broader realities of sex and reproduction. It is Bertha’s aunt, Miss Ley, who is given a speech impatiently telling the dry-as-dust Miss Glover, the vicar’s sister, that the basis of marriage is biological reproduction and nothing more.

‘Yes, I know what you all think in England,’ said Miss Ley, catching the glance and its meaning. ‘You expect people to marry from every reason except the proper, one – and that is the instinct of reproduction.’
‘Miss Ley!’ exclaimed Miss Glover, blushing.
‘Oh, you’re old enough to take a sensible view of the, matter,’ answered Miss Ley, somewhat brutally. ‘Bertha is merely the female attracted to the male, and that is the only decent foundation of marriage – the other way seems to me merely horrid. And what does it matter if the man is not of the same station, the instinct has nothing to do with the walk in life; if I’d ever been in love I shouldn’t have cared if it was a pot-boy, I’d have married him – if he asked me.’
‘Well, upon my word!’ said the doctor.
But Miss Ley was roused now, and interrupted him: ‘The particular function of a woman is to propagate her species; and if she’s wise she’ll choose a strong and healthy man to be the father of her children. I have no patience with those women who marry a man because he’s got brains. What is the good of a husband who can make abstruse mathematical calculations? A woman wants a man with strong arms and the digestion of an ox.’
‘Miss Ley,’ broke in Miss Glover, ‘I’m not clever enough to argue with you, but I know you’re wrong. I don’t think I am right to listen to you; I’m sure Charles wouldn’t like it.’
‘My dear, you’ve been brought up like the majority of English girls – that is, like a fool.’
Poor Miss Glover blushed. ‘At all events I’ve been brought up to regard marriage as a holy institution. We’re here upon earth to mortify the flesh, not to indulge it. I hope I shall never be tempted to think of such matters in the way you’ve suggested. If ever I marry I know that nothing will be further from me than carnal thoughts. I look upon marriage as a spiritual union in which it is my duty to love, honour, and obey my husband, to assist and sustain him, to live with him such a life that when the end comes we may be prepared for it.’
‘Fiddlesticks!’ said Miss Ley.

As with his hot-blooded descriptions of lust, Maugham’s correlation of human reproduction with animal reproduction i.e. as an animal instinct devoid of all moral or religious meaning, strikes me as definitely anticipating D.H. Lawrence.

Boldness about religion

And the same goes for his treatment of traditional religion. After his parents died, Maugham was brought up an orphan in the home of his father’s brother, the unimaginative vicar of Whitstable in the 1880s (hence the accuracy of the social comedy of provincial Kentish society in this novel).

Sometime in his student years, Maugham’s Christian faith just melted away and he experienced a tremendous sense of liberation, liberation (as Selina Hastings’s fabulous biography of Maugham makes crystal clear) to have sex with whoever he wanted, male or female.

Accompanying Miss Ley’s blunt truth-telling about sex, there is a similar passage in which Bertha brutally attacks the Christian faith. Devout, tightly-laced Miss Glover, the vicar’s spinster sister, has come to ‘comfort’ Bertha after she’s lost her baby in childbirth. Bertha demurs.

‘Oh, Bertha, you’re not taking it in the proper spirit – you’re so rebellious, and it’s wrong, it’s utterly wrong.’
‘I can only think of my baby,’ said Bertha, hoarsely.
‘Why don’t you pray to God, dear – shall I offer a short prayer now, Bertha?’
‘No, I don’t want to pray to God – He’s either impotent or cruel.’
‘Bertha,’ cried Miss Glover. ‘You don’t know what you’re saying. Oh, pray to God to melt your stubbornness; pray to God to forgive you.’
‘I don’t want to be forgiven. I’ve done nothing that needs it. It’s God who needs my forgiveness – not I His.’

The attack continues later, when Miss Glover returns with the vicar as back-up. Bertha initially starts off meekly reading the Prayer Book with them, but then breaks down:

‘I have no wish to “give hearty thanks unto God,”‘ she said, looking almost fiercely at the worthy pair. ‘I’m very sorry to offend your prejudices, but it seems to me absurd that I should prostrate myself in gratitude to God.’
‘Oh, Mrs. Craddock, I trust you don’t mean what you say,’ said the Vicar.
‘This is what I told you, Charles,’ said Miss Glover. ‘I don’t think Bertha is well, but still this seems to me dreadfully wicked.’
Bertha frowned, finding it difficult to repress the sarcasm which rose to her lips; her forbearance was sorely tried. But Mr. Glover was a little undecided.
‘We must be as thankful to God for the afflictions He sends as for the benefits,’ he said at last.
‘I am not a worm to crawl upon the ground and give thanks to the foot that crushes me.’
‘I think that is blasphemous, Bertha,’ said Miss Glover.
‘Oh, I have no patience with you, Fanny,’ said Bertha, raising herself, a flush lighting up her face. ‘Can you realise what I’ve gone through, the terrible pain of it? Oh, it was too awful. Even now when I think of it I almost scream.’
‘It is by suffering that we rise to our higher self,’ said Miss Glover. ‘Suffering is a fire that burns away the grossness of our material natures.’
‘What rubbish you talk,’ cried Bertha, passionately. ‘You can say that when you’ve never suffered. People say that suffering ennobles one; it’s a lie, it only makes one brutal…. But I would have borne it – for the sake of my child. It was all useless – utterly useless. Dr. Ramsay told me the child had been dead the whole time. Oh, if God made me suffer like that, it’s infamous. I wonder you’re not ashamed to put it down to God. How can you imagine Him to be so stupid, so cruel! Why, even the vilest beast in the slums wouldn’t cause a woman such frightful and useless agony for the mere pleasure of it.’

This powerful scene should take its place in any anthology describing the collapse of Christian belief in the later 19th century.

What with the Darwinian view of human reproduction, this forthright atheism, and the implicit theme of the New Woman throughout the novel, along with the numerous natural descriptions which I’ve mentioned, Maugham was clearly making an effort to write a Big Serious Novel tackling some of the fashionable Issues of the Day.

It doesn’t work because the central characters aren’t, in the end, really believable enough to support the great weight placed on them. But it’s a valiant attempt.

Miss Ley

All this is to overlook the third major character in the story who is, on one reading, arguably its most successful character – Bertha’s Aunt Mary, or Miss Ley as she’s referred to.

In the opening scenes of the novel, Bertha is still living under Miss Ley’s guardianship, we see them often together, and so she is one of the first characters we get to know and like. Although she then disappears from view for the long stretches which describe Bertha and Edward’s marriage, whenever Miss Ley does reappear – when Bertha goes to stay with her for a short break, and then runs away with her to the continent, and in the prolonged sequence when Bertha is staying with Miss Ley while she has her almost-affair with young Gerald – she was greeted with cheers from this reader. Why? Because she is drily, quietly funny.

Miss Ley sat on the sofa by the fireside, a woman of middle-size, very slight, with a thin and much wrinkled face. Of her features the mouth was the most noticeable, not large, with lips that were a little too thin; it was always so tightly compressed as to give her an air of great determination, but there was about the corners an expressive mobility, contradicting in rather an unusual manner the inferences which might be drawn from the rest of her person. She had a habit of fixing her cold eyes on people with a steadiness that was not a little embarrassing. They said Miss Ley looked as if she thought them great fools, and as a matter of fact that usually was her precise opinion. Her thin grey hair was very plainly done; and the extreme simplicity of her costume gave a certain primness, so that her favourite method of saying rather absurd things in the gravest and most decorous manner often disconcerted the casual stranger.

‘Saying rather absurd things in the gravest and most decorous manner’. Miss Ley emerges as the vehicle for the best of the book’s sub-Jane Austen sly wit, acting – especially in the first half – as the tart and comic centre of the novel, as drily cynical and Bertha is passionately romantic.

Humanity, Miss Ley took to be a small circle of persons, mostly feminine, middle-aged, unattached, and of independent means, who travelled on the continent, read good literature and abhorred the vast majority of their fellow-creatures.

She asked politely after [the doctor]’s wife, to whom she secretly objected for her meek submission to the doctor. Miss Ley made a practice of avoiding those women who had turned themselves into mere shadows of their lords, more especially when their conversation was of household affairs.

[Miss Ley] had already come to the conclusion that he [Craddock] was a man likely to say on a given occasion the sort of thing which might be expected; and that, in her eyes, was a hideous crime.

Miss Ley was anxious that no altercation should disturb the polite discomfort of the meeting.

Miss Ley revels in the embarrassment of other people, especially the uptight, narrow-minded provincials around her. She spends as much time as she can in London, and even more abroad in Italy (in another anticipation of a more famous novelist, this time E.M. Foster with his nice-girls-and-their-aunts-in-Italy stories). Whenever Miss Lay arrives back in Kent it is hilarious to watch the locals being affronted and outraged and shocked and tutting and twitching the curtains, under fire from Miss Ley’s dry wit and through Miss Ley’s quiet, sardonic gaze.

And she is not only an appealing character in her own right. But at a number of key moments (throughout Bertha’s early infatuation with Edward, then slyly noticing her loss of faith in her husband, and then throughout the Gerald affair) Miss Ley’s role as onlooker and chorus to the main action pushes her closer to the reader’s perspective.

It is as if she was standing next to us in the wings of a theatre, muttering an ironic commentary as we both watch the overwrought romantic heroine fainting and weeping and panting with passion.

Oscar Wilde

Moreover, Miss Ley gets most of the book’s one-liners. Much of the dialogue of Mrs Craddock contains the sub-Wildean cynical wit which was to characterise Maugham’s later string of extremely successful plays, such Oscarisms as:

‘Marriage is always a hopeless idiocy for a woman who has enough money of her own to live upon.’

‘Marriage is an institution of the Church, Miss Ley,’ replied Miss Glover, rather severely.
‘Is it?’ retorted Miss Ley. ‘I always thought it was an arrangement to provide work for the judges in the Divorce Court.’

‘Mr. Branderton has been to Eton and Oxford, but he conceals the fact with great success.’

‘My dear Dr. Ramsay, I have trouble enough in arranging my own life; do not ask me to interfere with other people’s.’

It is madness for a happy pair to pretend to have no secrets from one another: it leads them into so much deception.

‘I make a point of thinking with the majority – it’s the only way to get a reputation for wisdom.’

‘You wouldn’t rob us of our generals,’ said Miss Ley. ‘They’re so useful at tea-parties.’

And the fact that almost all of these lines are given to Miss Ley, and that she emerges as in many ways the most loveable character, explains why Maugham begins the book with a dedication – more precisely, a mock ‘Epistle Dedicatory’ – to her. He obviously liked her best of all the characters in the book, and she is the only one you would want to meet.

A tiny Marxist comment

Having just been to an extensive feminist art exhibition, and read numerous articles about the Judge Kavanaugh affair, and read some feminist articles about Maugham and Women and, given that Bertha is quite clearly a heroine who traditional feminist criticism would see as the oppressed, repressed, stifled, stymied victim of the Patriarchy – it is worth pointing out that Bertha never does a day’s work in her life.

Bertha lives her entire life off the labour of the workers on her father’s farms and estates, as does Miss Ley.

Both women live lives full of books and art and travel and galleries and fine feelings, their meals are cooked and served and cleared away by nameless faceless servants (we never learn the names of any of the Craddocks’ household servants or farm workers), their rooms are cleaned, their laundry is washed, trains run for them, boats sail for them, galleries open for them – without them ever lifting a finger to earn it.

They belong to the rentier class. They are social parasites. Edward works hard and is efficient and effective at transforming the fortunes of the Ley estate, at managing its livestock and agriculture, and joins local bodies like the parish council and freemasons, which he also runs with exemplary honesty and thoroughness. And for this – he is bitterly mocked by his wife:

Bertha soon found that her husband’s mind was not only commonplace, but common. His ignorance no longer seemed touching, but merely shameful; his prejudices no longer amusing but contemptible. She was indignant at having humbled herself so abjectly before a man of such narrowness of mind, of such insignificant character. She could not conceive how she had ever passionately loved him. He was bound in by the stupidest routine. It irritated her beyond measure to see the regularity with which he went through the varying processes of his toilet. She was indignant with his presumption, and self-satisfaction, and conscious rectitude. Edward’s taste was contemptible in books, in pictures, and in music; and his pretentions to judge upon such matters filled Bertha with scorn.

Books, art and music – that is how Bertha judges people, not for their character or dutifulness or patriotism or hard work. All these are rather ridiculous qualities in her eyes.

This scorn is echoed by young Gerald, himself the wastrel son of rich parents, who was kicked out of public school and has got his family’s housemaid pregnant.

On one occasion Edward comes up to see his wife during her stay with Miss Ley. After he has left, Gerald, the good-for-nothing idler, mocks solid, efficient, patriotic Edward Craddock to Miss Ley, who feebly defends him:

‘His locks are somewhat scanty but he has a strong sense of duty.’
‘I know that,’ shouted Gerald. ‘It oozes out of him whenever he gets hot, just like gum.’

This, one cannot help thinking, is all too often the attitude of high-minded writers and artists – regardless of gender or race – to the actual, physical, hard, demanding labour of making and maintaining the world; the smug condescension of the bookish toward those who do the daily necessary labour which makes their luxurious lives of fine feelings and deep thoughts and carefree travel possible.

Maugham pours so much feeling and sentiment and imagination and sympathy into hundreds of pages describing Bertha’s feelings and passions and thoughts and worries and fears and disillusion and unhappiness and despair – that it is easy to forget that she is a leech.

Plus ça change

Reading older literature, I am continually struck at the way that things which bothered the late-Victorians are still bothering us now. The status, roles and rights of women were exercising many of their best minds. Same now. And so was the problem of the poor, the homeless, and the huge inequalities in society. Same now.

But there are other, lesser issues, too, which made me think that some things really never change.

Railways For example, it was only last week that we were hearing about the Labour Party’s plans to renationalise the railways because, in private hands, the level of service given by the railways is shocking, and all the money they raise seems to end up as massive dividends for their shareholders. Well, here is what Maugham thought about British railways in 1902.

Though it was less than thirty miles from Dover to Blackstable the communications were so bad that it was necessary to wait for hours at the port, or take the boat-train to London and then come sixty miles down again. Bertha was exasperated at the delay, forgetting that she was now (thank Heaven!) in a free country, where the railways were not run for the convenience of passengers, but the passengers necessary evils to create dividends for an ill-managed company. (Chapter 23)

Brexit There’s a passage designed to contrast Edward’s narrow-minded Little Englandism and his simple patriotism with Bertha’s cultured cosmopolitanism and loathing of patriotic symbols (in this case, jingoistic late-Victorian music) which anticipates a lot of the rhetoric of Brexit. Manly if thick Edward is talking:

‘I don’t mind confessing that I can’t stand all this foreign music. What I say to Bertha is – why can’t you play English stuff?’
‘If you must play at all,’ interposed his wife.
‘After all’s said and done The Blue Bells of Scotland has got a tune about it that a fellow can get his teeth into.’
‘You see, there’s the difference,’ said Bertha, strumming a few bars of Rule Britannia, ‘it sets mine on edge.’
‘Well, I’m patriotic,’ retorted Edward. ‘I like the good, honest, homely English airs. I like ’em because they’re English. I’m not ashamed to say that for me the best piece of music that’s ever been written is God Save the Queen.’
‘Which was written by a German, dear Edward,’ said Miss Ley, smiling.
‘That’s as it may be,’ said Edward, unabashed, ‘but the sentiment’s English and that’s all I care about.’
‘Hear! hear!’ cried Bertha. ‘I believe Edward has aspirations towards a political career. I know I shall finish up as the wife of the local M.P.’
‘I’m patriotic,’ said Edward, ‘and I’m not ashamed to confess it.’
‘Rule Britannia,’ sang Bertha, ‘Britannia rules the waves, Britons never, never shall be slaves. Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay! Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!’
‘It’s the same everywhere now,’ proceeded the orator. ‘We’re choke full of foreigners and their goods. I think it’s scandalous. English music isn’t good enough for you – you get it from France and Germany. Where do you get your butter from? Brittany! Where d’you get your meat from? New Zealand!’ This he said with great scorn, and Bertha punctuated the observation with a resounding chord. ‘And as far as the butter goes, it isn’t butter – it’s margarine. Where does your bread come from? America. Your vegetables from Jersey.’
‘Your fish from the sea,’ interposed Bertha.
‘And so it is all along the line – the British farmer hasn’t got a chance!’ (Chapter 12)

Or again, Edward stoutly declares:

‘I’m quite content to be as I am, and I don’t want to know a single foreign language. English is quite good enough for me…. I think English people ought to stick to their own country. I don’t pretend to have read any French books, but I’ve never heard anybody deny, that at all events the great majority are indecent, and not the sort of thing a woman should read… What we want now is purity and reconstitution of the national life. I’m in favour of English morals, and English homes, English mothers, and English habits.’

Cosmopolitan contempt for Britain The cosmopolitan Miss Ley thinks there is something intrinsically pathetic about the English.

‘You’ve never had a London season, have you? On the whole I think it’s amusing: the opera is very good and sometimes you see people who are quite well dressed.’

To this day there is a broad streak of intellectual literary life which despises the English and worships the literature, climate, fashion and landscape of France or Italy.

Tourism When I went to Barcelona recently I couldn’t miss the graffiti everywhere telling tourists to go home and stop ruining their city. I’ve since read articles about other tourist destinations which are struggling to cope with the number of visitors. Back in 1902 Miss Ley shared this feeling that tourism was ruining everywhere, in this case Paris:

We have here a very nice apartment, in the Latin Quarter, away from the rich people and the tourists. I do not know which is more vulgar, the average tripper or the part of Paris which he infests: I must say they become one another to a nicety. I loathe the shoddiness of the boulevards, with their gaudy cafés over-gilt and over-sumptuous, and their crowds of ill-dressed foreigners. But if you come I can show you a different Paris – a restful and old-fashioned Paris, theatres to which tourists do not go; gardens full of pretty children and nursemaids with long ribbons to their caps. I can take you down innumerable grey streets with funny shops, in old churches where you see people actually praying; and it is all very quiet and calming to the nerves. And I can take you to the Louvre at hours when there are few visitors…

Infest! She says tourists infest parts of Paris. If she had been describing immigrants, the book would be banned.

Politicians are idiots In a funny scene Edward stands for election to the local council and makes a speech riddled with pompous expressions, bad jokes, stories which disappointingly taper off, but still manages to end with rousingly jingoistic rhetoric.

Bertha is more ashamed and embarrassed than she’s ever been in her life by its simple-minded idiocy. But the speech is greeted with wild applause and Edward is elected by a landslide. People, Bertha concludes, are idiots. And the biggest idiots of all are running the country.

There is nothing so difficult as to persuade men that they are not omniscient. Bertha, exaggerating the seriousness of the affair, thought it charlatanry [of Edward] to undertake a post without knowledge and without capacity. Fortunately that is not the opinion of the majority, or the government of this enlightened country could not proceed.

Throughout the book the reader finds the same tone, and the same arguments, applied to the same ‘issues’ that we are still discussing and arguing about, 120 years later. Many superficial details change – but arguments about the rights of women, the idiocy of politicians, the rubbish train system, the philistine patriotism and the snooty snobbery of the book and art world – all of this remains the same as ever.

Somerset Maugham’s books

1897 Liza of Lambeth
1902 Mrs Craddock
1915 Of Human Bondage
1919 The Moon and Sixpence

2009 The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham by Selina Hastings

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by Simon on October 9, 2018 • Permalink

Posted in Literature, Novel

Posted by Simon on October 9, 2018

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Up at the Villa by Somerset Maugham (1941)

‘Don’t be afraid. The devil’s a sportsman and he looks after his own.’ Rowley Flint

This is a ripping little novella, gripping and compelling, slightly ludicrous and strangely affecting, which I read from cover to cover in a single two-hour sitting. Maybe it would be the perfect introduction to Maugham for someone who’s never read him.

Background

When she was 22, Mary, a young lady from a good family, married Matthew Panton. Little did she realise he would turn into an alcoholic and a gambler. He gambled and was reduced to sottish inebriation every night, often not coming home at all because he had gone off with the first woman he could drunkenly chat up. After eight years he had gambled away his inheritance so it was tragic, but also a blessed relief, when he killed himself while driving blind drunk and had a high-speed car crash.

After prolonged discussion with the family lawyers it emerged that Mary had just enough income to survive, if she was frugal. So she welcomed a kind offer from friends, the Leonards, to go and recuperate at their villa overlooking Florence. It was not grand, it was a bit cold, but it was the perfect rest cure, with the added benefit of being looked after by the kind maid, Nina, and her husband, Ciro.

The plot

The story unfolds over a few fateful days. Mary is expecting a proposal of marriage from an old friend of her family’s, the eminent diplomat, Sir Edgar Swift, K.C.S.I., of the Indian Civil Service. Twenty five years her senior, he’s been in love with her since she was a teenager. They have had many discussions about it and now he is stopping over on a trip to Cannes, to propose to her.

Sir Edgar arrives, has tea, they talk politely and he informs her that he has been confirmed in the governorship of Bengal. Behind this is the possibility that he will one day be made Viceroy of all India. Marry him, and all that pomp and circumstance would be hers.

Maugham carefully investigates Mary’s feelings and hesitations on the matter – of course it would be a glorious life and yet… the age difference. She tells Sir Edgar she will give him her answer in three days’ time.

Submitting to her wish, Edgar leaves. As an after-thought, he insists she carry the revolver he’s given her when she goes out, since ‘you never know with all these foreigners about’. Touched and amused by his concern, she absent-mindedly agrees.

Mary then motors into Florence to attend a party given at a restaurant, Peppino’s, by the old Princess San Ferdinando. Despite her title, the Princess is in fact a humorously cynical old American lady who married an Italian prince some forty years earlier. He had affairs; he died. Whereupon she inherited his land, house and inheritance and has made herself into a well-established grande dame and hostess of Florentine society.

This is the kind of party which Maugham, for so long a hobnobber among the rich and titled, describes with such urbane confidence. I particularly enjoyed the character of the choleric old English traveler, Colonel Trail, much given to imbecile spluttering and indignation.

Also a guest is the wicked debauchee, young Rowley Flint, a kind of Errol Flynn character. (As a sample of his repartee, at one point he tells Mary that she is ‘an almost perfect specimen of the genus peach’ which made me laugh.) Rowley smooths up to Mary, with the sly encouragement of the wicked old princess, but Mary easily fobs him off – all carried off in the kind of sparkling dialogue which Maugham deploys to such effect in his many comic plays.

The Princess had arranged the party specially to hear a singer perform at Peppino’s but, to the Princess’s disgust, the singer is off sick tonight and has been replaced by a violinist. He is a shy, frail-looking man who plays a set of sentimental songs, but can’t overcome the disappointment of the rich clientèle. When he passes around a hat only a few coins and small notes are given.

Feeling sorry for him, Mary astonishes Rowley by handing over a hundred lira note.

At the end of the evening the Princess suggests to Mary that she give Rowley a lift to his hotel in her stylish little coupé. So she does. Rowley flirtatiously suggests they drive on into the country for a while, it being such a fine June evening.

During this drive a) Rowley makes a pass at Mary which b) she confidently rebuffs, during which she c) explains that he is the last kind of man she would have an affair with. If she was tempted to have an affair, it would be to make someone happy; to find someone less fortunate than herself, and to make him the gift of her lovely sexual body; to make the affair an act of charity. Rowley thinks this a ridiculous attitude and they squabble. So Mary drives Rowley back to his house, then turns round to drive up the hill to the villa.

At a bend in the road up the hill there is a fine viewing point and she pulls over and parks, gets out and stares out over the panorama of Florence by moonlight. Her mind and heart are confused and whirling: should she marry old Sir Edgar in order to have a distinguished middle-age? What of Rowley’s arguments that she is still young and beautiful and ought to enjoy life while she can? All mixed in with sad memories of her one true love, the husband who turned into a useless drunk.

She is so deep in thought that she is startled when a cigarette is lit in the shade of the tree next to her. Out from the shadow comes the violinist from Peppino’s, looking even poorer in his own clothes than when he’d been dressed in the threadbare costume of the troupe of musicians at the restaurant.

Initially scared, Mary is softened by his gentle attitude and poverty. Turns out he’s renting a room in one of the shacks further up the hill. Mary offers him a lift. On the way it turns out he’s had nothing to eat and so, by now feeling thoroughly sorry for him, she drives him on up to the villa.

She hears his story. His name is Karl Richter and he’s not Italian at all, but Austrian. He was among a student group which spoke out about the Anschluss (whereby Hitler’s Germany incorporated Austria in March 1938) whereupon they were all arrested, a couple shot and the rest thrown into a concentration camp. After a few months he managed to escape and made his way across the mountains to Italy, where he just about scrapes a living playing the violin.

As it happens the villa is decorated with impressive murals and, because Karl had mentioned that he was an art student back in Austria, Mary shows them to him. Then she takes him into the kitchen and cooks him bacon and eggs which he eats ravenously. Back in the living room there is a gramophone which, when she turns it on, proves to have a record of Austrian waltzes on it.

So it feels perfectly natural that they start dancing, her feeling his strong undernourished body pressed against her, he almost drunk with happiness, with a full stomach for the first time in months, mind filled with the wondrous art of the villa, and holding a beautiful woman in his arms.

Suddenly they are both overcome with passion, his fairly understandable, but Mary’s a logical consequence of the aim she stated to Rowley back in the restaurant – to make her love/body a gift of charity, to make someone happy. They make love.

Maugham tactfully skips the actual sex. Later she is sitting in an armchair chair, he sitting at her feet. Now the argument starts. He declares his undying love and that she must marry him, live with him, become his.

Mary delicately tries to explain that she’ll be leaving Florence in a few days because she’s going to say Yes in marriage to another man (Sir Edgar). Karl is upset and the more Mary tries to explain, the worse it gets. In her honest way, she can’t help revealing that she only took Karl to bed out of charity; she was doing a good deed. But from Karl’s point of view, the doorway to a wondrous better life had barely opened before she is slamming it shut in his face.

‘I didn’t mean to be cruel. My heart was full of tenderness and pity.’
‘I never asked for your pity. Why didn’t you leave me alone? You have shown me heaven and now you want to thrust me back to earth. No. No. No.’

At one point Karl approaches her threateningly, Mary remembers the gun and takes it from her handbag. Karl is so angry he shouts, ‘Yes, go on, shoot me, put me out of my misery.’ She drops it, he grabs her and, er… ravishes her, this time with real anger and aggression.

Once again they are lying on the bed after passion. Karl gets to his feet and she hears him padding round the dark bedroom. Suddenly there is a loud bang: he has shot himself through the chest.

Oh my God!

Part two

Maugham describes Mary’s panic-stricken reaction to this disaster. Practical worries swamped by her emotional reaction to the suicide of the man she’s just made love with. It’s made worse by the maid, Nana, tapping on the bedroom door, asking what the bang was. ‘It’s nothing,’ says Mary, ‘must have been a car backfiring in the road below.’ The only person she can think of who can help her in this crisis is Rowley, so she phones him and this begins part two of the book.

For Rowley turns out to be fantastically helpful, resourceful and reliable. Woken by her call in the middle of the night, he borrows his hotel porter’s pushbike and quickly cycles up to the villa.

Mary turns the light on, shows him the body and tells him the whole story with no omissions.

Rowley is shocked and appalled but quickly regains control. He tells her to fetch the car. They carry the body out and put it in the back. Rowley gets a towel and mops up all the blood on the floor. He drives to a place she suggests, up a remote hilltop road towards thick woods. They’re about to get the body out of the back when they see lights from a car coming along the same road. With quick thinking Rowley gets in the back with her (their feet on the warm corpse which is in the chairwell) and as the car goes by, make a big show of snogging, just another courting couple. The Italians in the car driving by whoop encouragement and start singing La donne e mobile. Italians.

Having finally disposed of the body, they drive back to the villa where Mary she says she’s got a luncheon appointment the next day but obviously can’t go. Quite the opposite, Rowley tells her. She mist take a sleeping pill now, and tomorrow she must go and be her usual bright and happy self.

Which is what she does. Takes pill, sleep deeply, wakes late. Bath and make-up helped by the maid. Then off to lunch at the Atkinsons’ and another of the frightfully posh social scenes Maugham does so well – old man Atkinson (‘a fine, handsome, grey-haired man, plethoric and somewhat corpulent, with an eye for a pretty woman’) flirting with Mary outrageously and Mary doing her best to keep up the light-hearted banter in between panic-stricken flashbacks to the night before.

I suppose it’s about here that one should mention that not much of this is very plausible. Mary is flustered alright, but shows little of the psychological trauma you might expect in a modern rendition of these events. The fact that she has to go to this lunch party – and that the conversation turns to the wretched little violinist they’d been forced to listen to the night before, instead of the hoped-for singer – are not indicators of ‘real life’ but of exactly the same kind of narrative logic you find in Maugham’s plays, or indeed of the popular American films noirs of the period.

Events are carpentered together in order to produce the best dramatic effects, with only a passing concern for psychological plausibility. This is brought out even more in the next few scenes which have a kind of melodramatic or even soap opera logic.

Chapter 7 Back at the villa after her lunch ordeal, Mary is sitting in the exquisite garden when Rowley saunters in and up to her. They review the events of the night before and Rowley points out they’ve been damn lucky. Mary tells him she’s really frightfully grateful. With a charming smile Rowley explains it’s because he likes the risk, the gamble, the excitement of an adventure.

Then he asks about the gun, which they had forgotten in all the excitement. Mary had put it back in her bedroom drawer – bad idea. To her horror, Rowley gets it then goes down to his bicycle and cycles off to the wood where he dumped the body. A little later he returns safely, saying he dropped it in a stream nearby.

It is only now that she gives a really thorough blow-by-blow explanation of what happened the night before, the flow of the conversation, the sex, the suicide. And Rowley gives his explanation:

‘I think I can tell you why he killed himself,’ he said at last. ‘He was homeless, outcast, penniless and half-starved. He hadn’t got much to live for, had he? And then you came. I don’t suppose he’d ever seen such a beautiful woman in his life. You gave him something that in his wildest dream he could never have dreamed of. Suddenly the whole world was changed because you loved him. How could you expect him to guess that it wasn’t love that had made you give yourself to him? You told him it was only pity. Mary, my dear, men are vain, especially very young men: did you never know that? It was an intolerable humiliation. No wonder he nearly killed you. You’d raised him to the stars and then you flung him back to the gutter. He was like a prisoner whose jailers lead him to the door of his prison and just as he is about to step out to freedom, slam it in his face. Wasn’t that enough to decide him that life wasn’t worth living?’

Mary is surprised that Rowley, according to ex-pat received opinion a well-known wastrel and ne’er-do-well, turns out to have such sensitive insight into other people. Which comes on top of her surprise at how sensible, calm and decisive he had been last night.

Mary hands him a telegram she received that morning from Sir Edgar. He will be arriving that afternoon. ‘Are you going to marry him?’ asks Rowley. ‘I need someone to look up to, someone to look after me,’ replies Mary.

But then she horrifies Rowley by announcing she will tell Edgar all about last night. ‘No, no, no,’ says Rowley. He knows these Empire Building types, the soul of integrity and honour. Sir Edgar has a shining ideal of her; it would be madness to destroy it. But I must she says, I must tell him the truth.

‘Have it your own way, sweetheart,’ replies insouciant Rowley, bids her adieu and saunters back out of the garden.

Chapter 8 There follows kind of scene Maugham excels at and which feels like it comes straight out of one of his plays. The worthy and dignified suitor, Sir Edgar, arrives to ask the hand of the younger women he has worshiped chastely and honourably all her adult life.

Unfortunately, ignoring Rowley’s advice, Mary does tell him about last night, leaving out nothing – the pity, the sex, the suicide, the hiding the body.

I don’t know whether we’re meant to be moved or amused or both by the subtlety with which Maugham describes the psychological negotiations which then ensue. It is like watching two masters play chess.

Mary realises she has shattered Edgar’s idealised vision of her – but that he is bound by his own code of nobility to continue with his proposal of marriage. That much she expected.

However, Edgar surprises Mary by announcing that he cannot now, of course, accept the post of Governor of Bengal. Why? Because now more than ever (i.e. in the dying days of the Raj) the British are only ruling by dint of their integrity. Sir Edgar wouldn’t be able to sleep at nights knowing that at some point, any point, in the future, the whole affair might somehow come out tarnish his reputation and, by extension, the entirety of British rule.

Not least because of the role played by bloody Rowley Flint. Sooner or later he’ll tell one of his many women and it will all come out. So it’s not so much his own personal fate Sir Edgar is concerned about, but that it might damage British rule in India and the Foreign Service to which he has dedicated his life.

No, he will resign his commission and they can live quietly somewhere, maybe the Riviera, on his pension.

Mary hadn’t expected this at all. She is appalled. She realises that her confession has made Sir Edgar abandon his career, now, just as it reached its climax of success, the reward of thirty years of loyal service. But that he feels obligated by his sense of honour to pursue his suit regardless of the cost to himself.

Her confession has ruined his life, and yet he has the honour and dignity to accept the fact quite calmly.

And so – just as in the best of his plays – we watch Maugham make his character think on her feet. She realises she must do the right thing and force Sir Edgar to drop his marriage proposal, in order to rescue his career. But it must be in such a way so as not compromise him, to make him feel he is fulfilling his duties. She must place herself in a guilty position, she must paint herself in such a way that he can honourably dump her.

And so Mary lights on the solution of telling Sir Edgar that, given the difference in age and the fact (previously well aired) that she doesn’t really love him, that although she respects him and has great affection for him etc,. she had only said yes because when he was working full time as governor they wouldn’t see very much of each other and so the marriage would have worked as a sort of companionable arrangement.

However, if he is to quit his job and they are to live as a retired couple on the Riviera, well, they would be in each other’s faces all day long. And this wouldn’t work.

He was silent for a long time. When he looked at her again his eyes were cold.
‘You mean that you were prepared to marry the Governor of Bengal, but not a retired Indian Civilian on a pension.’

Excellent. Result. Mary has made herself appear heartless and scheming. She has killed not only his love for her, but his respect. She has given Sir Edgar the gift of enabling him to drop his suit with a clear conscience.

‘In that case we need not discuss the matter further.’
‘There doesn’t seem much point in doing so, does there?’

Abruptly frigid and correct, Sir Edgar stands up. He shakes her hand. He leaves. End of scene.

Chapter 9

Rowley rings up and is his usual flippant self.

‘Have you got any ice in the house?’ he said.
‘Is it to ask me that that you made me come to the phone?’ she answered coldly.
‘Not entirely. I wanted to ask you also if you had any gin and vermouth.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Yes. I wanted to ask if you’d give me a cocktail if I got into a taxi and came along.’
‘I’ve got a lot to do.’
‘That’s fine. I’ll come along and help you.’

Rowley turns up and, to cut a long story short, renews the proposal of marriage which he had made a few nights earlier, when he was drunk and she was driving him home. He tells Mary he has a farm in Kenya which he’d been letting a manager manage for him, but he’s just sacked him and fancies going out to manage the place himself. Fancy coming along?

‘How on earth could I ever hope to keep you even moderately faithful?’
‘Well, that would be up to you. They say a woman ought to have an occupation, and that would be a very suitable one for you in Kenya.’

But:

‘But I don’t love you, Rowley.’
‘I told you the other night, you will if you give yourself half a chance.’

Does it matter that none of this is particularly plausible? No. It is a social comedy, a comedy of manners, just like his many smash-hit West End plays. The reader’s job is not to seek for deep psychological analysis or investigation of the human condition. It is to be entertained and amused.

What the hell. Mary says Yes.

Rowley gave a great throaty chuckle. He jumped up and dragged her to her feet and flung his arms round her. He kissed her on the mouth. ‘So now what?’
‘Well, if you insist on marrying me… But it’s an awful risk we’re taking.”
‘Darling, that’s what life is for – to take risks.’

As delicious, as piquant, as sharp and sweet as a lemon sorbet.

Dolce far niente

Decades of holidaying on Capri and then living at his sumptuously-located villa in the south of France gave Maugham a profound feel for the physical and psychological well-being produced by beautiful Mediterranean landscapes and the balmy air of southern nights.

To dine there on a June evening, when it was still day, and after dinner to sit till the softness of the night gradually enveloped her, was a delight of which Mary felt that she could never tire. It gave her a delicious feeling of peace, but not of an empty peace in which there was something lethargic, of an active, thrilling peace rather in which her brain was all alert and her senses quick to respond. Perhaps it was something in that light Tuscan air that affected you so that even physical sensation had in it something spiritual. It gave you just the same emotion as listening to the music of Mozart, so melodious and so gay, with its undercurrent of melancholy, which filled you with so great a contentment that you felt as though the flesh had no longer any hold on you. For a few blissful minutes you were purged of all grossness and the confusion of life was dissolved in perfect loveliness.

Although at its core is a grisly sequence of events, this short book is punctuated by lyrical descriptions of beautiful scenery and stylish living. Here’s a description of the Atkinsons’ lunch party.

On that warm day of early June there was an animation in the air which put everyone in a good humour. You had a sensation that no one there was affected by anxiety; everyone seemed to have plenty of money, everyone seemed ready to enjoy himself. It was impossible to believe that anywhere in the world there could be people who hadn’t enough to eat. On such a day it was very good to be alive. (p.66)

God knows, there’s no shortage of ‘serious’ and ‘literary’ authors who can effortlessly convey feelings of anguish and despair, delving deeply into the tragedy and absurdity of existence. One of Maugham’s great appeals as a storyteller is that, even in the midst of sordid or even murderous events, he is able in the settings and the atmosphere of his stories to convey moods of great tranquility and serenity.

Somerset Maugham’s books

This is nowhere near a complete bibliography. Maugham also wrote countless articles and reviews, quite a few travel books, two books of reminiscence, as well as some 25 successful stage plays and editing numerous anthologies. This is a list of the novels, short story collections, and the five plays in the Pan Selected Plays volume.

1897 Liza of Lambeth
1898 The Making of a Saint (historical novel)
1899 Orientations (short story collection)
1901 The Hero
1902 Mrs Craddock
1904 The Merry-go-round
1906 The Bishop’s Apron
1908 The Explorer
1908 The Magician (horror novel)
1915 Of Human Bondage
1919 The Moon and Sixpence

1921 The Trembling of a Leaf: Little Stories of the South Sea Islands (short story collection)
1921 The Circle (play)
1922 On a Chinese Screen (travel book)
1923 Our Betters (play)
1925 The Painted Veil (novel)
1926 The Casuarina Tree: Six Stories
1927 The Constant Wife (play)
1928 Ashenden: Or the British Agent (short story collection)
1929 The Sacred Flame (play)

1930 Cakes and Ale: or, the Skeleton in the Cupboard
1930 The Gentleman in the Parlour: A Record of a Journey From Rangoon to Haiphong
1931 Six Stories Written in the First Person Singular (short story collection)
1932 The Narrow Corner
1933 Ah King (short story collection)
1933 Sheppey (play)
1935 Don Fernando (travel book)
1936 Cosmopolitans (29 x two-page-long short stories)
1937 Theatre (romantic novel)
1938 The Summing Up (autobiography)
1939 Christmas Holiday (novel)

1940 The Mixture as Before (short story collection)
1941 Up at the Villa (crime novella)
1942 The Hour Before the Dawn (novel)
1944 The Razor’s Edge (novel)
1946 Then and Now (historical novel)
1947 Creatures of Circumstance (short story collection)
1948 Catalina (historical novel)
1948 Quartet (portmanteau film using four short stories –The Facts of Life, The Alien Corn, The Kite and The Colonel’s Lady)
1949 A Writer’s Notebook

1950 Trio (film follow-up to Quartet, featuring The Verger, Mr. Know-All and Sanatorium)
1951 The Complete Short Stories in three volumes
1952 Encore (film follow-up to Quartet and Trio featuring The Ant and the Grasshopper, Winter Cruise and Gigolo and Gigolette)

2009 The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham by Selina Hastings

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by Simon on April 21, 2018 • Permalink

Posted in Books, Novel

Tagged Ciro, Colonel Trail, Florence, India, Italy, Karl Richter, Mary Panton, Matthew Panton, Maugham, Nina, Novella, Princess San Ferdinando, Rowley Flint, Sir Edgar Swift, suicide, the Anschluss

Posted by Simon on April 21, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/04/21/up-at-the-villa-somerset-maugham/

Our Betters by Somerset Maugham (1923)

This is another of Maugham’s well-made comedies. Apparently it was written during the Great War, in 1915, but not staged in England until 1923 because it was thought that it might alienate American public opinion, which we were trying to persuade to enter the war.

It is set in the cynical but stylish High Society we are used to from Maugham, but this time concerns a group of Americans, not posh Brits – Americans who have married into British or European ‘Society’.

The characters

There is a sort of chorus of three mature American matrons who have married British, French or Italian aristocrats:

Pearl, Lady Grayston who married George Grayston, a baronet
Minnie Hodges who married and then divorced the Duc de Surennes and now is always in love with some beautiful young man or other, currently the gorgeous pouting young Tony Paxton
Flora van Hoog, who married an Italian aristocrat to become the Princess della Cercola but, when he began taking mistresses, abandoned him to come and live in London and now pursues philanthropic causes and charities which she pesters her friends about.

There is also a couple of older American men who have made their way in British society: the brash, loud and over-dressed Thornton Clay, and the corrupt 70-year-old American Arthur Fenwick who made his fortune selling poor quality food to the American working classes and is now opening stores to do the same here in London.

Together these five represent a variety of ways older Americans have integrated and exploited their position. Set against them are the Younger Generation who are trying to make their life decisions, namely whether to marry for love or money (a dilemma which would have been familiar to Jane Austen a century earlier).

Young Bessie Saunders is heiress to an American fortune staying with her older sister, Pearl. Pearl’s husband, Lord George Grayston, very conveniently doesn’t live with her, allowing her to conduct her gay social life and numerous flirtations in London’s High Society without hindrance. All three acts are set in her houses – Act One in her grand town house in Grosvenor Square Mayfair, and Acts Two and Three in Pearl’s country retreat at Abbots Kenton, Suffolk.

Bessie has only recently arrived from America and been swept off her feet by the giddy whirl of London society. Back in the States she was engaged to a nice, unspoilt, young American gentleman, Fleming Harvey when she was 16 and he 18. Soon after arriving in London and seeing the wider world she wrote him a letter breaking off the engagement. She is being wooed by an English aristocrat, Lord Harry Bleane. Now Harvey has arrived in London and, understandably, commences trying to woo her back.

Meanwhile Act One introduces the love triangle between the good looking, slender, immaculately dressed but poor young Brit, Tony Paxton, with whom the ‘Duchesse’ (original name Minnie Hodgson, daughter of a Chicago millionaire who made his money in pork) is besottedly in love. It only slowly emerges that Tony is revolted by the desperation of the Duchesse’s passion and has become smitten with Pearl, precisely because she is so playfully unavailable.

Comedy

Comedy is extracted from the interaction of all these types – the three cynical ladies, the earnest and easily shocked young American boy Harvey, the sincere English Lord Bleane, the spoilt brat Tony Paxton, with Bessie playing her part: only slowly does it emerge that the play hinges on Bessie’s choice of whether to stay in England and marry an English lord in order to join the kind of amoral if stiflingly ‘correct’ lifestyle the three ladies live – or whether to reject European corruption and return to pure and innocent America (the subject of many of Henry James’s novels).

And there is something deeply comic about the way all these amoral characters pursue their cynical schemes against the backdrop of the impeccable formality of the grand house in Grosvenor Square Mayfair and at Pearl’s country retreat at Abbots Kenton, Suffolk, with their silent servants, especially the butler, Pole.

Just the existence of a dutiful and obedient butler, overhearing all their selfish schemes with complete discretion, is itself funny. ‘Very good, m’lady.’

Speaking of Funny, Maugham isn’t Oscar Wilde. His bon mots don’t ring and dazzle. But the play does have quite a few moments of brightly comic dialogue.

Bessie: Does George know?
Pearl: Who is George?
Bessie: Don’t be absurd, Pearl. George – your husband.

Or:

Fleming: Has it occurred to you that he wants to marry you for your money?
Bessie: You could put it more prettily. You could say that he wants to marry me with my money.

Or:

Clay: Some of these American women are strangely sexless.
Fleming: I have an idea that some of them are even virtuous.
Pearl [with a smile]: It takes all sorts to make a world.

Or:

Duchesse: I know he’s lying to me, there’s not a word of truth in anything he says. But he’s so slim I can never catch him out.

Or:

Pearl: You’re the very person we want, Thornton. An entirely strange young man has suddenly appeared on my doorstep and says he is my cousin.
Clay: My dear Pearl, that is a calamity which we Americans must always be prepared for.

And:

Duchesse: He makes me so miserable but I love him… He wants to marry me, Pearl.
Pearl: You’re not going to!
Duchesse: No, I won’t be such a fool as that. If I married him I’d have no hold over him at all.

Act Two

In Act Two, at Pearl’s country house, various interactions give us a deeper sense of the characters – of the three older women’s American backgrounds, the men they married, how they’ve coped with divorce and separation and so on.

Fleming is still really sweet on Bessie but she is agonising over whether to accept Lord Bleane. Fleming would like to hate Bleane but is disappointed to discover that he’s actually a good guy who tells Bessie he was originally attracted to her money (the fact that she was rich being broadcast all over London by her elder sister, Pearl) but that now he really is in love with her.

Their story is, for this middle part of the play, eclipsed by the passion with which pretty young Tony Paxton a) is revolted by the cloying over-attention the lurid Duchesse lavishes on him b) is powerfully attracted to Pearl. Against the latter’s better judgement Paxton persuades her to accompany him to the tea-house in the garden. Duchesse, in her violent jealousy, suspecting something is up, despatches innocent little Bessie to fetch her handbag from the same tea-house where Bessie sees… something so horrible that she rushes back into the drawing room where all the other characters are playing cards (are the couple having just a snog or actually having sex??). When Minnie provocatively asks what on earth is wrong with her, it prompts the tear-filled admission that she has seen Pearl and Tony… together!

When Pearl and Paxton make a nonchalant entrance to the drawing room it is to discover that everybody knows (know what? were they having a snog? a grope? full-on sex? it is never explained).

Tony has blown his relationship with Duchesse. More fatally, the doting old millionaire Fenwick has all his fond illusions about Pearl being pure and romantic utterly burst. ‘The slut, the slut’ he repeats, in angry despair. Given that he substantially funds her lifestyle this is a major blow.

Act Three

Act Three takes place in the same drawing room on the afternoon of the following day. The atmosphere is very strained, Pearl didn’t come down from her bedroom for either breakfast or lunch, the innocent menfolk (Clay and Fleming) and women (the Princess) tiptoed around the furious fuming Duchess while Fenwick was purple with rage. Their conversation informs us that the previous evening turned into a blazing row with words exiting the dementedly angry Duchess’s mouth that none of them had ever heard before, as she screamed her rage at Tony and Pearl.

The Duchess is pouring her heart out to the Princess when Tony sidles in looking for cigarettes. There is a comic scene where she turns on him, all outraged pride and anger, insisting he leave the house immediately and will be booted out of the flat in London which she pays for him to live in, while Tony is all sullen pouting. But the comedy is in the slow insinuating way in which their positions shift until the Duchesse is begging Tony to be nice to her and, eventually, she makes the Grand Concession of relenting and saying she will marry him – to which Tony’s only response is ‘Does that mean I’ll be able to drive the Rolls-Royce?’ By this stage we have grasped the depths of the Duchess’s helpless infatuation and the true extent of Paxton’s shallow selfishness.

The remaining scenes showcase Pearl’s brilliantly scheming to redeem a tricky situation: it will take all her wiles and cunning.

First she makes an entrance looking fabulous. Then she holds tete-a-tetes with Bessie, Clay, the Duchess and Fenwick. She reveals all her cunning ploys to Clay (and thus, to us, the audience).

1. To the Duchess she reveals that she has been phoning all her contacts that morning and has managed to get Tony a job in the government, nothing too demanding. Over the course of feline dialogue she is slowly able to win the Duchess back round to being her friend.

2. Then she explains to Clay how she is going to play the little-girl-lost for Fenwick whose self-image is of a Strong Masterly Man; she will play weak to encourage his narcissistic sense of his own masculine resilience, and so it pans out. After five minutes she has him back eating out the palm of her hand under the delusion that he is magnanimously forgiving her.

Only Bessie, her sister, sees straight through her and indeed through the lifestyle of all these Americans-in-Europe.

She has a big scene where she begs Lord Blaine to release her from their engagement. At the centre of the scene is the Author’s Message: Bessie has seen that English girls are bred up to responsibility and dignity and so know how to handle and manage their wealth; whereas the American women who marry into the British aristocracy have no sense of noblesse oblige or duty, but simply see it as an opportunity for frivolous pleasure, hence their silly flirting and superficial romances. It is not them, it is the niche they move into, which turns them into monsters. As Bessie has seen at close quarters how her beloved elder sister Pearl has become a monster of manipulation. Bessie is determined not to become like that.

The play ends with her witnessing her sister’s pièce de resistance – first thing that morning Pearl had sent her Rolls to London to collect the most fashionable dancing teacher in London and beg him to come down and stay the night. When he enters all the guests who swore they would leave in disgust at her behaviour (Fenwick, the Princess, but especially the Duchesse and Paxton) all confirm that they will stay for dinner and dancing. Despite committing just about the worst social crime imaginable (being caught red-handed being unfaithful to her elderly lover and stealing her best friend’s lover) Pearl has manipulated everyone into forgiving and forgetting.

Bessie watches all this with disgust and, in the last line of the play, vows she will be returning to America at the first opportunity.

So it’s a brittle social comedy of comically amoral, upper-class behaviour among rich American title-hunters in England – with just enough of a sting in the tail to elude the censorship but have the more high-minded critics admitting that it does have a sound moral message. It is, in other words, a clever and entertaining theatrical confection perfectly suited for its times.

Adaptations

The play was turned into a Hollywood movie in 1933, directed by George Cukor. Here’s a clip.

It was adapted for BBC radio in 1998.

It had previously been revived at the Chichester Theatre in 1997, with the throaty American actress Kathleen Turner playing Pearl and Rula Lenska as the Duchesse. The fact that Turner plays the same role in the radio broadcast suggests that one led on to the other. The Daily Telegraph reviewed the stage play. I am puzzled why Patrick O’Connor casually calls Maugham misogynist since a) all the strongest characters are women, the men being just foils and pretexts b) the women themselves cover a wide range from the strong, clever, scheming Pearl to the genuinely innocent but, ultimately decisive, Bessie.

Daily Telegraph review of Our Betters

Somerset Maugham’s books

1930 Cakes and Ale: or, the Skeleton in the Cupboard
1930 The Gentleman in the Parlour: A Record of a Journey From Rangoon to Haiphong
1931 Six Stories Written in the First Person Singular (short story collection)
1932 The Narrow Corner
1933 Ah King (short story collection)
1933 Sheppey (play)
1935 Don Fernando (travel book)
1936 Cosmopolitans (29 x two-page-long short stories)
1937 Theatre (romantic novel)
1938 The Summing Up (autobiography)
1939 Christmas Holiday (novel)

2009 The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham by Selina Hastings

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by Simon on April 10, 2018 • Permalink

Posted in Literature, Play, Theatre

Posted by Simon on April 10, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/04/10/our-betters-somerset-maugham/

Cakes and Ale by Somerset Maugham (1930)

The sky was unclouded and the air hot and bright, but the North Sea gave it a pleasant tang so that it was a delight just to live and breathe. (Chapter 3)

I’ve been accumulating a pile of second-hand Somerset Maugham paperbacks over the past few years, waiting till I felt the impulse to start reading them. I can’t believe how easy to read and enjoyable they are. Even when the short stories (in particular) have unpleasant moments (the missionary’s suicide in Rain, the revelation of incest in The Book-Bag) they don’t really undermine the general tone of leisured ease and peaceful contemplation which his books exude, the warm-bath feel of the narrator’s well-educated, well-off, comfortable observation of life’s foibles and follies. Even when tragic events happen, somehow all Maugham’s stories have a fundamentally comic air.

Cakes and Ale

This is particularly true of Maugham’s satire on the English literary scene, Cakes and Ale which is a charming story of youth and illusions. It’s easy to see why Maugham himself always said it was his favourite book.

The narrator is William ‘Willie’ Ashenden, who we have met in the book-length set of stories about a spy during the Great War which featured the same character, and was published only two years earlier (1928).

The events

The sequence of events is fairly straightforward: young Willie Ashenden grows up in the (fictional) town of Blackstable (transparently based on the actual town of Whitstable) on the Kent coast, in the care of his conventional uncle who is the town vicar.

Willie is brought up as an impeccable Victorian snob with a strong sense of the town’s social hierarchy including who to talk to and who not to talk to. His uncle and aunt particularly disapprove of a local celebrity, Edward Driffield, a middle-aged man who’s risen from very ‘common’ origins to make a living ‘writing books’ and who has married a local barmaid, Rosie Gann, a woman who, in the great phrase of the day, is no better than she ought to be.

But as it happens, young Willie quite literally bumps into the pair as they’re all out experimenting with the newfangled invention, the bicycle on one fine Kentish summer day. They get talking and he becomes friendly with them, often meeting with them. Around these encounters is woven a portrait of Blackstaple society with its snooty middle class, its publicans, sailors and farm workers, and the local roaring boy, ‘Lord’ George Kemp.

One day Willie is flabbergasted to learn that Edward and Rosie have flown the coop, jumped the moon, done a bunk, disappeared, leaving behind a trail of debts and angry shopkeepers.

Five years later Willie is a 21-year-old medical student working at (the fictional) St Luke’s hospital when he bumps into Rosie in the street. She takes him to her and Edward’s modest house in Pimlico and Willie becomes a regular attendant at Edward’s ‘at homes’. Here he meets writers and artists and playwrights and is encouraged to continue the writing which he himself is pursuing in secret.

He notices that Rosie enjoys the company of a number of other young men including a painter, an actor and a writer, and finds himself becoming jealous. He gets a few opportunities to squire her around town himself, and after one of these nights out she kisses him. He invites her to his rented rooms. She slips out of her complicated Victorian dress. Naked, she is as pneumatic and life-affirming as she is in social life.

In a little while she got out of bed. I lit the candle. She turned to the glass and tied up her hair and then she looked for a moment at her naked body. Her waist was naturally small; though so well developed she was very slender; her breasts were straight and firm and they stood out from the chest as though carved in marble. It was a body made for the act of love. In the light of the candle, struggling now with the increasing day, it was all silvery gold; and the only colour was the rosy pink of the hard nipples.

Rosie stays the night. They have become lovers. Inevitably, after the initial shock and amazement at spending time with such a wonderfully sensuous naked young woman, Willie becomes more suspicious of her other ‘young men’. The ups and downs of their relationship over the next few months are described in detail.

And then the situation again undergoes a violent wrench when Rosie abruptly abandons Edward, and runs off – we later discover, to America with ‘Lord’ George the only man she ever loved.

Thirty years later the narrator, now a successful author, visits New York on a lecture tour and out of the blue gets a note from Rosie, now living in Yonkers, who’s read about his visit in the papers. He goes out there to visit her, now a snowy-haired 70 year old, but still with the same sparkling eyes and vivacity. She explains her real feelings for Driffield, for the narrator, for Lord George. Her philosophy is simple: love is good, why not share it?

The plot

So much for the events in the past; this isn’t how they are presented in the novel. Instead the novel concerns The Present in which Edward Driffield has been dead for many years and has gone from being a minor mostly ignored writer of late Victorian working class life to becoming ‘a classic of English letters’. The mature Ashenden is approached by a literary gadfly and careerist, Alroy Kear.

Kear has been approached by Driffield’s second wife, to write the official biography of her dear departed husband. This request creates a tangled web of narrative which overlays the actual events of the past. For after Rosie fled, Driffield was taken up by an ambitious literary lady and patron of the arts, Mrs Barton Trafford (a type which throngs Maugham’s stories about late Victorian London).

Mrs Barton Trafford determines to ‘make’ Driffield’s reputation and it is fascinating to read the sections which describe the way she set about currying favour with newspaper reviewers, magazine critics and proprietors, persuading the great and good of the day to write serious articles about his novels, and then organised lecture tours up and down the country, fed items to gossip columnists, had his photo taken in dignified poses and widely distributed. All the time the real Ted Driffield preferred nipping down to the pub and spending the evening jawing and yarning with local workers and common folk, but all this was smoothed over by Mrs Barton Trafford’s unstoppable campaign.

It was entirely due to her single-handed efforts over 10 years that Driffield eventually found himself widely lauded as a Grand Old Man of English Literature. Which made it all the more galling (and comic) when he falls ill, she packs him off to Cornwall to recuperate, and he promptly marries the nurse he was sent with, Amy. This second Mrs Driffield promptly steps into the role of Guardian and Protector of the now elderly writer, sidelines Mrs Barton Trafford and it is she who, now, decades later, has commissioned the fiercely careerist Kear to write her late husband’s official biography.

And where does Ashenden come into all of this? Kear, in his feline insinuating way, invites him to dinner at his club and down to Blackstable to meet the second Mrs Driffield, because he – Kear – knows that Ashenden grew up in the same town and had contact as a boy and then as a young man with the Driffield household. Nobody else still living has that knowledge. Ashenden is the best and only source for those years of Driffield’s life. Hence Kear’s comically silky manner and obsequiousness to our amused and playful narrator.

Two track narrative

So the novel runs on two time frames: in the present Kear makes his first approach, takes Ashenden to dinner, has follow-up meetings, then invites him down to Blackstaple to meet the widow. And each of these encounters is a trigger for the narrator to reminisce about the key episodes in his acquaintance with Ashenden. Think of the corny technique in old movies where a character reminisces and the screen goes all wavy and shimmery to convey the sense of travelling back decades to a character’s youth. The episodes are quite substantial:

a year or so in Blackstaple when Willie was 16
a good spell in Pimlico, when Willie escorts Rosie around London, then becomes her lover (for over a year), gets jealous of her continuing affairs with other young men, then she absconds
the final meeting in New York 30 years later

The first two episodes are extended exercises in nostalgia and social comedy. In both of them the mature narrator looks back to his earlier self with fondness and indulgence. And it’s not just about him and Mr and Mrs Driffield, arguably the real strength of the book is the complete social context Maugham creates. In Blackstaple we get thorough portraits of his stern uncle and straitlaced aunt, of the verger who helps out in the church, of laughing ‘Lord’ George, and of his uncle’s simple, vivacious housemaid Mary-Anne, who went to school with Rosie, initially disapproves of her until she comes to visit at which point she, like everyone else, is won over by Rosie’s simple happiness.

In fact it’s an oddity, presumably deliberate, that Driffield himself, the central figure around who the entire story and all the other characters rotate, is left peculiarly blank. We hear very little about his works or literary opinions. There is far more, for example, and far more vivid characterisation of Willie’s uncle’s maid Mary-Anne.

Similarly, during the second flashback, in Pimlico, the most vivid character is Willie’s cockney landlady, Mrs Hudson, who is given pages of comic dialogue and no-nonsense common sense.

I wish to goodness I had had the sense (like Amy Driffield with her celebrated husband) to take notes of her conversation, for Mrs. Hudson was a mistress of Cockney humour. She had a gift of repartee that never failed her, she had a racy style and an apt and varied vocabulary, she was never at a loss for the comic metaphor or the vivid phrase. She was a pattern of propriety and she would never have women in her house, you never knew what they were up to (‘It’s men, men, men all the time with them, and afternoon tea and thin bread and butter, and openin’ the door and ringin’ for ’ot water and I don’t know what all’); but in conversation she did not hesitate to use what was called in those days the blue bag. One could have said of her what she said of Marie Lloyd: ‘What I like about ’er is that she gives you a good laugh. She goes pretty near the knuckle sometimes, but she never jumps over the fence.’ Mrs. Hudson enjoyed her own humour and I think she talked more willingly to her lodgers because her husband was a serious man (‘It’s as it should be,’ she said, ‘ ’im bein’ a verger and attendin’ weddings and funerals and what all’) and wasn’t much of a one for a joke. ‘Wot I says to ’Udson is, laugh while you’ve got the chance, you won’t laugh much when you’re dead and buried.’

Mrs. Hudson’s humour was cumulative and the story of her feud with Miss Butcher who let lodgings at number fourteen was a great comic saga that went on year in and year out. ‘She’s a disagreeable old cat, but I give you my word I’d miss ’er if the Lord took ’er one fine day. Though what ’e’d do with ’er when ’e got ’er I can’t think. Many’s the good laugh she’s give me in ’er time.’

A lot of the novel is like this, a loving recreation of the working class diction and humour of the 1890s and 1900s, of a world of slaveys and hansom cabs and music halls and elaborate Victorian dresses which were all long, long gone when Maugham published the book in 1930.

On another level, there is sustained satire of the London literary scene and the machinations required to ‘get ahead’ in it. Mrs Barton Trafford stands out as a magnificent portrait of a social schemer. But all the scenes with Alroy Kear in them are priceless, for Kear isn’t stupid – he is very very clever and his super-polite approaches to Ashenden and Ashenden’s amused prevarications and toying with him, are described in exquisite detail.

Love

But the heart of the novel isn’t the satire of the literary world, still less the career of the fairly innocent old man who is amused to find himself elevated to the pantheon of English Literature. It is Love. The character of Rosie the barmaid-turned-wife of the middle-aged writer is the real star of the book. She is what we still, despite all the efforts to liberalise our attitude to sex, call ‘promiscuous’. While married to Driffield she is also sleeping with the painter, Lionel Hillier, the actor Harry Retford and Ashenden and, as he later finds out, ‘Lord’ George as well.

We watch the narrator’s point of view mature from regarding her with awe when he is a snobbish 16 year old – to experiencing his first storm of sexual bliss with her and then on to his feelings of sexual jealousy with her, when he is in his early 20s – and then, finally, as a much older man, he listens with accepting wisdom to her account of why she abandoned Driffield to run off with ‘Lord’ George.

All the way through she simply believes that Love is a good thing, Love ought to be shared, Love ought to be encouraged, ‘Lord’ George asked her to go with him and she thought, well, why not?

This trajectory in which the narrator becomes more and more open-minded, forgiving and tolerant reaches its apogee when Willie is having tea with Kear and the second Mrs Driffield, who both openly insult Rosie for being a wanton hussy and nymphomaniac. For once the narrator loses his urbane self-possession and becomes quite heated in her defence.

‘She was virginal like the dawn. She was like Hebe. She was like a white rose.’
Mrs. Driffield smiled and exchanged a meaning glance with Roy.
‘Mrs. Barton Trafford told me a great deal about her. I don’t wish to seem spiteful, but I’m afraid I don’t think that she can have been a very nice woman.’
‘That’s where you make a mistake,’ I replied. ‘She was a very nice woman. I never saw her in a bad temper. You only had to say you wanted something for her to give it to you. I never heard her say a disagreeable thing about anyone. She had a heart of gold.’
‘She was a terrible slattern. Her house was always in a mess; you didn’t like to sit down in a chair because it was so dusty and you dared not look in the corners. And it was the same with her person. She could never put a skirt on straight and you’d see about two inches of petticoat hanging down on one side.’
‘She didn’t bother about things like that. They didn’t make her any the less beautiful. And she was as good as she was beautiful.’
Roy burst out laughing and Mrs. Driffield put her hand up to her mouth to hide her smile.
‘Oh, come, Mr. Ashenden, that’s really going too far. After all, let’s face it, she was a nymphomaniac.’
‘I think that’s a very silly word,’ I said.
‘Well, then, let me say that she can hardly have been a very good woman to treat poor Edward as she did. Of course it was a blessing in disguise. If she hadn’t run away from him he might have had to bear that burden for the rest of his life, and with such a handicap he could never have reached the position he did. But the fact remains that she was notoriously unfaithful to him. From what I hear she was absolutely promiscuous.’
‘You don’t understand,’ I said. ‘She was a very simple woman. Her instincts were healthy and ingenuous. She loved to make people happy. She loved love.’
‘Do you call that love?’
‘Well, then, the act of love. She was naturally affectionate. When she liked anyone it was quite natural for her to go to bed with him. She never thought twice about it. It was not vice; it wasn’t lasciviousness; it was her nature. She gave herself as naturally as the sun gives heat or the flowers their perfume. It was a pleasure to her and she liked to give pleasure to others. It had no effect on her character; she remained sincere, unspoiled, and artless.’
Mrs. Driffield looked as though she had taken a dose of castor oil and had just been trying to get the taste of it out of her mouth by sucking a lemon.

She loved love. And what is wrong with that? But lots of people from that day to this think that love should only exist in pre-set, socially acceptable formulations, should be rationed to ‘loving’, ‘committed’ relationships. Why?

In 1978 I joined the Campaign for Homosexual Equality although I am not myself gay. It seemed to me outrageous that gays and lesbians should be subject to different laws than straight people. Why shouldn’t people be free to do whatever they want with their bodies and their private parts, so long as they don’t actively harm others?

Maugham was himself bisexual, with a prevalence for homosexuality. He certainly chose to live the last forty years of his life with a male partner. Who cares? As he himself put it:

My own belief is that there is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.

Exactly. So, mixed in with all Cakes and Ale’s social comedy and satire on London literary world, is a fairly straightforward plea for sexual tolerance and compassion, all conveyed through the wonderful character of Rosie the barmaid. As one critic writes it is ‘Her character, charm, beauty and humour draw everyone around her like moths to a flame.’

Happy

It’s a wonderfully life-affirming book. Maugham wrote it in the Villa Mauresque on the Riviera, which he had recently bought (in 1927) and where made his home along with his partner Gerald Haxton for the rest of their lives. Just turning 50, Maugham was a success, both in terms of having made a name for himself in the literary world, but also in simple cash terms, having made pots of money from his plays, short stories and from the movie adaptations which were beginning to be made of them.

He lived in a big house in the sunshine by the sea with his lover and wrote this book.

Which helps explain why Cakes and Ale radiates happiness. The wonderfully life-affirming characterisation of Rosie is embedded in a beautifully evocative portrait of rural Kentish life, and studded with wickedly satirical portraits of London bookland.

And it is cunningly and artfully constructed, with the flashbacks from the various situations in the present giving a pleasing complexity to its structure and to the canny, well-paced unfolding of the narrative.

On all levels it is a book to treasure and reread.

Somerset Maugham’s books

1930 Cakes and Ale: or, the Skeleton in the Cupboard
1930 The Gentleman in the Parlour: A Record of a Journey From Rangoon to Haiphong
1931 Six Stories Written in the First Person Singular (short story collection)
1932 The Narrow Corner
1933 Ah King (short story collection)
1933 Sheppey (play)
1935 Don Fernando (travel book)
1936 Cosmopolitans (29 very brief short stories)
1937 Theatre (romantic novel)
1938 The Summing Up (autobiography)
1939 Christmas Holiday (novel)

2009 The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham by Selina Hastings

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by Simon on April 7, 2018 • Permalink

Posted in Books, Novel

Posted by Simon on April 7, 2018

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The Gentleman in the Parlour by W. Somerset Maugham (1930)

Laughter is the only reality. (Chapter 9)

Maugham is very candid in his preface about his motives in writing this book. It was 1922 and he was an established and very successful author, of novels and also a series of smash-hit West End plays. He fancied a break from writing novels, had written one travel book (On a Chinese Screen) more or less by accident, worked up from notes on a journey and now, having seen how it was done, he fancied undertaking another journey but this time with the conscious aim of writing a carefully composed and crafted travel book.

The preface explains that, whereas the novel is necessarily a mongrel form, since dialogue, descriptions of scenery, moments of comedy or moments of tragedy, require the novelist to vary his style to be appropriate for each of these different moments, by contrast the travel book need contain no such varieties of tone.

Here prose may be cultivated for its own sake. You can manipulate your material so that the harmony you seek is plausible. Your style can flow like a broad, placid river and the reader is borne along on its bosom with security; he need fear no shoals, no adverse currents, rapids, or rock-strewn gorges.

The travel book can be an essay in style.

The journey

In Ceylon Maugham met a British government official who recommended he visit Keng Tung, in the remote Shan States in the north of Burma. So Maugham sailed to Rangoon, travelled on to Mandalay, where he set off by mule for the remote Keng Tung. After 26 days he arrived and recorded his impressions before carrying on to the Thai border, whence he travelled by car to Bangkok. Then by boat to Cambodia, a trek to the famous temple complex at Angkor Wat, another river trip to Saigon and then a coastal journey via Hue to Hanoi.

At this point the narrative ends, though Maugham went on to Hong Kong, crossed the Pacific, the United States, and the Atlantic, returning to London to resume his career as author and socialite.

Pause for reflection

The main thing about this book is that he waited until seven years after the trip to write it i.e. it wasn’t knocked out in the heat of the moment for money. Maugham gave himself seven years in which to shape and craft the narrative. Hence the way the preface emphasises style over impact and hence the book’s very leisurely, patrician prose. And also the fact, brought out in biographies and in Paul Theroux’s fascinating introduction, that the content of the book is highly manipulated. Not to put too fine a point on it, Maugham made stuff (particularly people) up, and by the same token, omitted a lot of important facts.

Most obviously, Maugham travelled with his long term partner, Frederick Haxton, and it was Haxton who made all the necessary arrangements, organised all travel and accommodation details, as well as approaching and befriending people of all classes throughout the journey, something Maugham was very bad at because of his stammer and his shyness. But in the book Haxton never appears, Maugham appears to have no white companion at all. On the contrary, the strong impression is given is that Maugham was an intrepid and solo traveller.

Meeting people

Throughout the book (and indeed throughout his short stories) the narrator describes the way he has a special skill at extracting confidences and anecdotes from the people he meets. Indeed there is a quotable paragraph which I’ve read quoted in other introductions and articles about Maugham, where he analyses the special skill he has in gaining people’s confidence and hearing their stories.

Often in some lonely post in the jungle or in a stiff, grand house, solitary in the midst of a teeming Chinese city, a man has told me stories about himself that I am sure he had never told to a living soul. I was a stray acquaintance whom he had never seen before and would never see again, a wanderer for a moment through this monotonous life, and some starved impulse led him to lay bare his soul. I have in this way learned more about men in a night (sitting over a siphon or two and a bottle of whiskey, the hostile, inexplicable world outside the radius of an acetylene lamp) than I could if I had known them for ten years. If you are interested in human nature it is one of the great pleasures of travel. (p.32)

Thus the narrative includes a number of stories confided in him by the people who he meets:

The story of Masterson, the decent white man who takes a native wife and has three pretty children but, when she asks him to formally marry her, can’t bring himself to; he wants to eventually retire in dignity to Cheltenham. And so she leaves him as Maugham finds him a few months later, desolate and abandoned.
The haunting episode with the Italian priest living in a hand-built mission in the remotest part of the Burmese jungle.
The Frenchman in the teak forest who bursts into tears over a couplet of Verlaine.
The florid cast of characters aboard the ship from Bangkok to Saigon, including a soulful Italian tenor, an ugly little French governor and his statuesque wife, and the Wilkins, the cheerful American owners of a travelling circus.
The lengthy encounter with a man named Grosely who approaches him at his hotel in Haiphong claiming to have known him at medical school in London back in the early 90s. Now he is raddled and gone to seed. He invites Maugham to his squalid rooms in the roughest part of the native quarter where he lives with a retired prostitute he’s married, and offers him a pipe of opium (which Maugham refuses) before telling him the strange and sad story of his life: to wit, he made a fortune working as a tide waiter in China, taking bribes from opium smugglers, all the time fantasising about returning to London. When, after 20 years, he finally returned to London with a fortune, he found it bigger, noisier, unfriendlier than he remembered, the women stand-offish, the men snobby. Eventually, he realised he preferred the East and headed back towards China but was overcome by fear that, now, his memories of China would prove equally as false. So he stopped off at Haiphong on a temporary basis, and said he’d complete the trip any day now. He’d been saying that for five years. Another of Maugham’s subtle grotesques.

It is a bit of a shock to learn that some of these stories appeared elsewhere, in magazines, as fictions. I also noticed several passages of ruminant meditation which appear in some of the short stories. For Maugham the borderline between fiction and fact was obviously pretty porous, as were the borders of his texts: if a passage worked, why not use it elsewhere? appears to have been his practice.

Also, once I had really soaked up his leisurely bookish approach to travelling, it began to dawn on me that Maugham is a collector of people. He relishes their peculiarities and absurdities, their sad love stories, their ridiculous passions.

Reading this book doesn’t shed much light on the factual background of the British Empire in the East (none, really); but it makes you realise that a lot of his short stories are like those glass display cases in which Victorian collectors kept stuffed specimens, of exotic birds and rare butterflies pinned to boards. Only Maugham’s stuffed exhibits are people.

Maugham himself describes how he has to sit through countless boring dinners and endless chat over whiskey and soda at the club, before the magic moment arrives and a person discloses themself, reveals the nugget, their essence, the one great story they have about their lost love or their great triumph or a ghoulish murder, which excites his imagination, which fuels him, which he can work up into one of his wonderful short stories.

Descriptions

I expected there to be lots of anecdotes about people but was surprised that there is quite so much description of landscape, not necessarily Maugham’s strongest point. Particularly on the first part of the trip, the 26 day mule trek through jungle, up into mountain, and across wide sluggish Burmese rivers, there are many passages of description worth stopping and savouring.

Then, the muleteers’ duties accomplished and the servants having unpacked my things, peace descended upon the scene, and the river, empty as though man had never adventured up its winding defiles, regained its dim remoteness. There was not a sound. The day waned and the peace of the water, the peace of the tree-clad hills, and the peace of the evening were three exquisite things. There is a moment just before sundown when the trees seem to detach themselves from the dark mass of the jungle and become individuals. Then you cannot see the wood for the trees. In the magic of the hour they seem to acquire a life of a new kind so that it is not hard to imagine that spirits inhabit them and with dusk they will have the power to change their places. You feel that at some uncertain moment some strange thing will happen to them and they will be wondrously transfigured. You hold your breath waiting for a marvel the thought of which stirs your heart with a kind of terrified eagerness. but the night falls; the moment has passed and once more the jungle takes them back. It takes them back as the world takes young people who, feeling in themselves the genius which is youth, hesitate for an instant on the brink of a great adventure of the spirit, and then engulfed by their surroundings sink back into the vast anonymity of mankind. The trees again become part of the wood; they are still and, if not lifeless, alive only with the sullen and stubborn life of the jungle. (Chapter 14)

Maughamese

Having pointed this out in reviews of his short stories I had vowed not to mention it in this review, but Maugham really does have a cranky way with the English language.

I took to the road once more. One day followed another with a monotony in which was nothing tedious. (Chapter 15)
I had with me a number of books that would have improved my mind and others, masterpieces of style, by the study of which I might have made progress in the learning of this difficult language in which we write. (Ch 15)
I had wandered so long through country almost uninhabited that I was dazzled by the variety and colour of the crowd. (Chapter 18) This is French word order, placing the adjective after the noun
There are perhaps a dozen monasteries in Keng Tung and their high roofs stand out when you look at the town from the little hill on which is the circuit-house. (Chapter 21) ‘on which is’ sounds like a German expression to me; it’s not natural English.

What’s so odd is that Maugham makes several explicit references to his struggle to write elegantly and yet so continually fails to do so. He was born and bred in France till the age of ten. French was his first language, and it was obviously a lifelong battle to shake off the influence of French word order, a battle he never won.

In fact the struggle to write clearly is so obviously a theme of the book and his seven-years’ labour on it that he devotes a paragraph to a typically candid and self-deprecatory account of his own style.

When I was young I took much trouble to acquire a style; I used to go to the British Museum and note down the names of rare jewels so that I might give my prose magnificence, and I used to go to the Zoo and observe the way an eagle looks or linger on a cab-rank to see how a horse champed so that I might on occasion use a nice metaphor; I made lists of unusual adjectives so that I might put them in unexpected places. But it was not a bit of good. I found I had no bent for anything of the kind; we do not write as we want but as we can, and though I have the greatest respect for those authors who are blessed with a happy gift of phrase I have long resigned myself to writing as plainly as I can. I have a very small vocabulary and I manage to make do with it, I am afraid, only because I see things with no great subtlety. I think perhaps I see them with a certain passion and it interests me to translate into words not the look of them, but the emotion they have given me. But I am content if I can put this down as briefly and baldly as if I were writing a telegram. (Chapter 37)

This is both true and not true. Maugham is obviously posing (to himself as well as to his readers) as a man of simple tastes and plain prose. And it is an accurate description of some of his prose. But not all of it. Throughout his texts the prose is continually troubled by efforts at fine writing, description and philosophical lucubrations. He may have believed this account when he wrote it – or he may be cannily offering it to the reader as an apology and a claim to our sympathy – but it is far from being the whole story of this man’s odd and lifelong struggle with the English language.

The most important thing about this paragraph is its positioning, in the middle of what turns out to be the longest descriptive passage in the book, a love letter to the wondrousness of the temple complex at Angkor Wat, which continues on to a lyrical paean to the sculpture and art of the ancient Khmers. Maugham’s claims to prosey simplicity are themselves just an element in his tricksiness. It’s part of his appeal.

A life of ease

The struggle Maugham so visibly has to write basic, clear English prose sheds ironic light on the claim in the preface that the book will be an ‘exercise in style’.

So much so that I think we do best to stop applying it to his style of language and apply it more accurately to his style of living. More than descriptions of jungle or temples, more than anecdotes about white men in remote imperial outposts, what the book radiates is Maugham’s love of ease and leisure. Travelling by river is calm and monotonous. Day follows day on the mule trek across the mountains, all merging into one. Arriving at the little government bungalows along the way, he immediately makes himself at home. Two pages are devoted to describing his cook (unsatisfactory, eventually fired). Every morning his loyal Gurkha servant brings freshly ground coffee. When he finally arrives at a town with modern facilities he is in clover.

It was pleasant to have nothing much to do. It was pleasant to get up when one felt inclined and to breakfast in pyjamas. It was pleasant to lounge through the morning with a book.

He makes a great point of not knowing anything. He doesn’t read any guidebooks or mug up on local history. He satirises that approach in the (fictional?) character of a Czech who, he claims, is up early and out to take notes on all the different Buddhist temples in pagan, and has made a life’s study of acquiring general knowledge. He is, by his own admission, ‘a mine of information’. Maugham mocks him. He prefers to skim across the surface of things, letting his imagination project stories, snatches of dialogue, really glorified whims and fancies, onto the surface of people, scenery, places and landscapes.

I travelled leisurely down Siam. (Chapter 26)

The key words are: leisurely, nonchalant, ease, peace, laze, loll, lie, lounge, bath, verandah, smoke. Wherever he finds himself, Maugham regularly takes out his pipe and has a calming, relaxing smoke. In the depths of the jungle after 26 days’ journey by mule, he fantasises of a hotel where he can toast his toes by a fireside and lounge in an easy chair with a comfortable book. Above all, Maugham conveys a sense of quite wonderful, bookish, rather frivolous ease and leisure.

To ride in a teak forest, so light, so graceful and airy, is to feel yourself a cavalier in an old romance. (Chapter 26)

I think it is this, this ability to be at home, relaxed, to find the lazy, lyrical sometimes whimsical aspect of any situation, which makes all of Maugham’s books such a pleasure to read. They are extremely relaxing.

Books and art

An indication of the extent to which the book is more an exercise in a certain nonchalant, unflappable style of travelling and a deliberate avoidance of facts and analyses in favour of charming impressions is the steady flow of references to Western art and books: Rembrandt, Titian, Michelangelo, El Greco and Velasquez, Monet and Manet, Veronese and Cimabue are just some of the painters knowledgeably referenced: and Wordsworth, Lamb and Hazlitt (the title of this book is a quote from Hazlitt’s essay about ‘going a journey’), Proust, Bradley the philosopher, Verlaine and La Fontaine, George Meredith, Walter Pater, John Ruskin, Euphues and Sir Thomas Browne are just some of the writers invoked and even quoted.

Thus he is able to write the splendidly contrived and humorous sentence:

The uneventful days followed one another like the rhymed couplet of a didactic poem. (Chapter 24)

A bit later, he writes:

The village street was bordered by tamarinds and they were like the sentences of Sir Thomas Browne, opulent, stately, and self-possessed. (Chapter 26)

Both of which expect of the reader a familiarity with a certain type of rather dusty old literature. This assumption of knowledge is part of the strategy of the prose: you could react badly to it, and dismiss Maugham as a pompous old bore; but I happen to have read my share of didactic rhyming poems and Sir Thomas Browne, so I not only smile in recognition of the reference, but also smile at the preposterousness of the way Maugham’s first thought, lazily sailing down a river in Burma or entering a dusty oriental town, is of very English literary references.

It is this – to us nowadays, maybe forced and pretentious – approach, which is part of what he means when he talks about ‘an exercise in style’.

The British Empire

Modern politically correct, post-colonial critics find tearing into Maugham’s dilettante attitude easy meat. Above all it’s easy to criticise him for not showing a flicker of interest in the government, economy, political situation or native peoples of the countries he passes through. Hopefully my review has made clear by now that that kind of thing is exactly what he was deliberately avoiding, not least because he knows he’s not very good at it. In his own day there was no shortage of left-wing critics (and an entire political party, the Labour Party) writing books and articles attacking the exploitative nature of the British Empire. Maugham knows he is not in the same business, he is in the entertainment business.

That said, right at the start of the book there is a very interesting page where he tackles the issue head-on. He imagines a future historian of the Decline and Fall of the British Empire reading his book and being appalled at the lack of interest it shows in the subject. But what’s interesting is what Maugham has this historian say about the British Empire between the wars, what – presumably – Maugham himself thought about the Empire — and this is that he found it to be ruled weakly and ineffectually.

It is the great paradox of the British Empire that it achieved its largest size between the wars and yet at the same moment was struck by paralysing doubt. Thus Maugham has his future historian lament that the British held their empire with ‘a nerveless hand’, that they held their office only through the force of guns yet tried to persuade the natives they were there on their own sufferance, they offered efficiency and benefits to people who didn’t want them; British power was tottering because the masters were ‘afraid to rule’, lacked confidence in themselves and so commanded no respect from the natives, the British tried to rule by persuasion rather than power, who were troubled by the feeling that they were ‘unfit to rule’.

Though only a page long, it is a fascinating and powerful indictment and goes a long way to explaining the sudden collapse of the Empire after the Second World War.

Soulful moments

In among the lazy descriptions of jungle and temple, tiffin and evening pipes, are some genuinely thoughtful moments. Not too thoughtful, mind – Maugham goes out of his way to explain that he is not a philosopher (although he likes reading a bit of philosophy every morning before breakfast is served). Nonetheless, a consistent attitude emerges, which is his admiration for simplicity and lack of pomposity.

He admires Buddhism. He admires its simplicity and takes some time to reimagine the circumstances of Prince Gautama’s life and decision to abandon everything. He comes across a tiny village in the remote Burman jungle and ponders that their way of life, handed down from generation to generation, is admirable, honest and pure. He greatly admires the Italian priest labouring in the jungle. He likes the good and the simple.

This rather basic philosophy is reinforced by lyrical descriptions of the peace and mystery of the jungle, and the equally beguiling atmosphere of some of the Buddhist temples. He encounters many of these and so there are many descriptions of the eerie, absorbent quality of the gold-leafed statues of Buddha, especially when the light of the setting sun sets them aglow. Here he is on a houseboat in Ayudha.

When I awoke in the night I felt a faint motion as the houseboat rocked a little and heard a little gurgle of water, like the ghost of an Eastern music travelling not through space but through time. It was worth while for that sensation of exquisite peace, for the richness of that stillness, to have endured all that sight-seeing.

The Gentleman in the Parlour illustration in Radio Times by C.W. Bacon (1950s)

The Gentleman in the Parlour illustration in the Radio Times by C.W. Bacon (1950s)

Somerset Maugham’s books

1930 Cakes and Ale: or, the Skeleton in the Cupboard
1930 The Gentleman in the Parlour: A Record of a Journey From Rangoon to Haiphong
1931 Six Stories Written in the First Person Singular (short story collection)
1932 The Narrow Corner
1933 Ah King (short story collection)
1933 Sheppey (play)
1935 Don Fernando (travel book)
1936 Cosmopolitans (29 x two-page-long short stories)
1937 Theatre (romantic novel)
1938 The Summing Up (autobiography)
1939 Christmas Holiday (novel)

2009 The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham by Selina Hastings

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by Simon on April 1, 2018 • Permalink

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Posted by Simon on April 1, 2018

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Collected short stories of Somerset Maugham volume three

Ashenden had a confident belief in the stupidity of the human animal, which in the course of his life had stood him in good stead. (Miss King)

In 1928 Maugham published Ashenden, or the British Agent, a book-length collection of linked short stories, told in the first person, about a British spy based in Switzerland during the First World War.

The stories are highly autobiographical. When the Great War broke out Maugham had volunteered to work in the ambulance corps and served on the Western Front for a year. In 1915 he returned to Britain to promote his new novel, Of Human Bondage, but then found it impossible to return to the ambulance work. His wife, Syrie, arranged for him to be introduced to a high-ranking intelligence officer, referred to in the stories, as ‘R’. (Syrie does not appear in of these stories.)

Since he came from a family of distinguished lawyers, with a father who had served in the Diplomatic Service, Maugham was deemed to be a good security risk, recruited and despatched to Switzerland in September 1915. He was one of the network of British agents who operated against ‘the Berlin Committee’, a German-funded spy organisation which had numerous projects afoot to undermine the British war effort. One of these was to encourage Indian revolutionaries to overthrow Britain’s colonial rule in India, a theme which has a long story devoted to it.

Maugham returned to Britain after a year. In June 1917 the British Secret Intelligence Service asked him to undertake a new mission, this time to Russia. He was to be part of an attempt to keep the Provisional Government brought to power in the February Revolution in power, and Russia in the war, by countering German pacifist propaganda. Two and a half months after he arrived the Bolsheviks staged their coup and seized control, ultimately signing a peace treaty with Germany.

The stories in Ashenden, or the British Agent are:

R.
A Domiciliary Visit
Miss King
The Hairless Mexican
The Dark Woman
The Greek
A Trip to Paris
Giulia Lazzari
Gustav
The Traitor
Behind the Scenes
His Excellency
The Flip of a Coin
A Chance Acquaintance
Love and Russian Literature
Mr. Harrington’s Washing

Volume three of Maugham’s collected short stories is devoted to the Ashenden tales, but for this republication he amalgamated the 16 short stories listed above into six longer ones. I can see why he did this, it makes the stories all about the same length, all long and meaty, and it gives a kind of weight to the book. He also added an additional story, Sanatorium, which doesn’t appear in the original 1928 volume.

Overview of the stories

Switzerland

Miss King incorporates A Domiciliary Visit and Miss King
The Hairless Mexican incorporates The Hairless Mexican, The Dark Woman and The Greek
Giulia Lazzari incorporates A Trip to Paris and Giulia Lazzari
The Traitor incorporates Gustav and The Traitor

Russia

His Excellency incorporates Behind the Scenes and His Excellency
Mr. Harrington’s Washing incorporates A Chance Acquaintance, Love and Russian Literature and Mr. Harrington’s Washing

Years later

Sanatorium

The stories themselves

1. Miss King

Three pages describe Ashenden’s recruitment into the Service by ‘R’, described as tall, clever, dispassionate, his piercing eyes too close together.

Then we jump to a description of Ashenden returning to Geneva on the ferry which he uses once a week to pop across the lake to France to file his reports. In Geneva he discovers two policemen waiting in his hotel room. Technically, the French visits are illegal and they examine his passport and question him after having obviously searched the place in his absence. Ashenden knows he could face two years in a Swiss prison for illegal activities. He also knows that ‘R’ won’t lift a finger to help him. That’s part of the deal. His cover is that he is a writer (true) and has come to Switzerland to complete a play, a light comedy (also true). The draft manuscript of the play is on his desk and the Swiss detectives have noted it. They leave with no further fuss.

There are two further strands in this story: in one Ashenden spends a few pages facing down one of his operatives in Germany who’s insisting on a raise. Ashenden says like it or lump it but if you betray us things will go very badly for you.

Then the final part of the story gives us an overview of the hotel where Ashenden stays, and the cast of exotic guests – the Austrian baroness, the Egyptian pasha and his family and numerous other dubious characters – any or all of which might be spies like himself. Ashenden, in his lofty amused style, is considering having a flirtation with the Baroness, not just to fish for information but for the fun of it, however after a few days he receives a stiff message from London telling him to lay off. So, he realises – he is being watched!

In the middle of the night he is woken by the hotel staff and asked to come to Miss King’s room. The tiny old lady has had a stroke and cannot speak. Her little black eyes are trying to tell him something. He promises her he will stay with her. Completely separate from any considerations of espionage or the war, Ashenden or Maugham wins our respect for his humanity and compassion. He stays with her till she dies.

2. The Hairless Mexican

‘R’ calls Ashenden to the French city of Lyon to brief him (over a characteristically luxurious meal) that a Greek agent, Andreadi, is travelling from Greece to Brindisi in Italy with documents for German intelligence.

He then introduces him to an extraordinary character, the larger-than-life Mexican Manuel Carmona, who insists on being referred to as ‘the General’ and immediately starts recounting stories of his heroic deeds in Mexico where he would have been the next Minister of War had it not been for the present government which had him arrested, but he escaped etc. But all this is to overlook his main feature which is that he is completely hairless; he wears a wig and his eyebrows are painted on.

Ashenden is to accompany the Mexican to Italy, where they will split up, Ashenden going to stay in Naples while the Mexican meets Andreadi off the Brindisi ferry and brings him to Ashenden. For the purpose of the trip Ashenden has the cover name ‘Somerville’.

The point of the story isn’t at all Andreadi or the papers, it is Ashenden’s bemused reaction to the Mexican’s absurdly larger-than-life speech, manner and behaviour. He nearly misses the train to Rome, he shows off his knife and revolver, with swaggering stories about how he used both, when he takes Ashenden for a meal at a low dive he immediately chats up and dances with the prettiest hooker in the joint.

After a prolonged description of this preposterous character there is an eventual sting in the tail of this story, but you’ll have to read it to find out.

3. Giulia Lazzari

Called to Paris, Ashenden is briefed by ‘R’ at another characteristically swanky restaurant. The most important Indian nationalist – Chandra Lal – the leader of the group which has been organising unrest and bomb attacks in India with a view to distracting British forces from the Western Front, is coming to Europe, specifically to Switzerland, to pass on information to German agents there.

‘R’ tells Ashenden that Lal has fallen in love with a dancer – Giulia Lazzari – an entertainer, a courtesan who he met in a cabaret in Berlin. MI6 tracked her across Europe and arrested her when she came to England. Searching her belongings they discovered passionate love letters from Lal. Ashenden’s mission is to accompany Lazzari back to Thonon on the French side of Lake Geneva, and do whatever is necessary to force Lazzari to persuade Lal (by letters) to cross the lake and visit her. Lal will be arrested as soon as he steps on French soil.

And this is just what happens. The interest isn’t in the result, it is in the interaction between Ashenden and Lazzari; it is in his simultaneously clinical use of her and his odd, detached compassion.

4. The Traitor

In the first part Ashenden goes to Basel to check on one of his most successful agents inside Germany, the spy ‘Gustav’ who sends detailed accounts of troop movements and so on. He is not all that surprised to find him at home with his wife despite having just despatched a ‘top secret’ message from Mannheim. Without much pressure, the ‘spy’ admits that he’s been living in his nice apartment with his wife all this time, making up his reports from newspapers and magazines.

In the second part Ashenden is sent to Berne to get to know a boisterous Englishman, Grantley Caypor, living in a hotel there with his grudging German wife, who MI6 now have proof is a spy and a traitor, for he is sending German High Command information for a salary of £40 a month.

Again, the interest isn’t in the ‘story’ as such, it is entirely in the depth and detail with which Maugham depicts this character, big bluff and jovial, a hearty walker in the mountains, interested in botany and boyishly devoted to his ugly bull-terrier.

‘R’ has instructed Ashenden to use the cover name Somerville again and to put about a cover story that he’s recovering from an illness and had previously worked in the British Government Censorship Office.

‘R’s plan is simple. He knows the censorship story will get back to Caypor’s minders; he knows they will immediately think of using ‘Somerville’ as a way of getting Caypor into the Censorship Office, too good an opportunity to miss.

And so it comes to pass: with suddenly frightened eyes, Caypor asks ‘Somerville’ for recommendations to his superiors in London which ‘Somerville’, acting all artless and helpful, writes for him, and Caypor reluctantly sets off to France and then to London. He doesn’t want to; he knows the risk; but his German minders have obviously forced or even blackmailed him into doing it. And Ashenden knows all this.

Every day Caypor’s tight little German wife goes to the post office expecting the letter he’d promised to send when he arrives safely. But it never comes and ‘Somerville’ knows why. Caypor will have been arrested on reaching British soil, tried and executed as a traitor. Ashenden envisions the scene, the grey morning, the blindfold, one member of the firing squad throwing up, the officer stepping forward to fire the coup de grace.

The ‘interest’ is in Maugham’s clinical observation of Caypor, noting every detail of his quirks and characteristics, pondering the One Big Message of Maugham’s fiction which is that People are More Complicated Than They Seem.

5. His Excellency

The Russia stories dramatise Maugham’s second mission, to Russia, between the March revolution and the Bolshevik coup in October.

The first one describes Ashenden’s encounters with the British Ambassador to Russia, initially rather frosty, but which slowly warm up until the Ambassador invites him to dine in the extraordinary splendour of the British Embassy.

No summary can convey just how incredibly posh and upper class this meal is, both men dressed to the nines, at a small dining table in the vast dining room designed to hold 60, festooned with paintings by Old Masters, gold candelabra. In this setting Ashenden tells a story-within-a-story, about a successful British diplomat they both know – Byring – who threw away his career after falling in love with the most famous courtesan in Europe.

Before I started reading his short stories I had the impression that Maugham was the poet laureate of colonial life in the Far East, but there turn out to be far more stories about swanky meals at posh restaurants in London or very, very upper-class dinner parties at which the narrator tells or hears stories about the very highest in society. Although he is at pains to depict himself as an outsider, as a writer only admitted for his fame and not really a part of this society, nonetheless this is Maugham’s real milieu.

Stepping back from the details of this story, it is staggering that Maugham was in Russia during the most exciting months of its history, and yet that his longest, most intense story about being there is an account of a very formal dinner with the unutterably upper-class ambassador at which neither of them even mention the War or Russian politics.

Instead the discussion of Byring’s foolishness leads on to the best thing in the book, which is a long monologue in which the Ambassador reveals that he himself had a rash and foolish love affair when he was a young man without connections, with a penniless and vulgar circus performer. This doesn’t sound particularly promising but, in the ornate surroundings of the embassy dining room, with the candles flickering, the Ambassador becomes so electrified by his vivid memory of the past and by the one great love of his life that he is reduced to tears, Ashenden is mortified with embarrassment and the reader is absolutely transfixed. It is one of the most riveting things I’ve ever read. My heart was racing when it ended.

6. Mr. Harrington’s Washing

The scene completely switches to describes Ashenden’s arrival by ship at Vladivostock. Ashenden had (as Maugham did) crossed the Atlantic, taken a train across America then ship from San Francisco to Japan and then onto the East Russian port.

Here Ashenden boards the Trans-Siberian Express for the 11-day non-stop train journey to Saint Petersburg and the point of this story has nothing to do with espionage – Ashenden is cooped up for this entire time with the most boring American in the world, Mr John Quincy Harrington who talks relentlessly, in a dull monotone about his family, friends, the excellence of the United States, as well as describing in detail the plotlines of all the books he’s ever read, and on, and on, and on, till Ashenden feels like he’s going mad. It is a portrait every bit as exasperatingly funny as the ambassador’s story in the chapter before had been intense and moving.

Once he finally arrives at Petrograd the mood changes as Ashenden meets, contacts and sizes up the situation – namely the army is mutinous and the Kerensky government weak and on the verge of collapsing.

However, you shouldn’t be alarmed that too much seriousness will intrude on Maugham’s habitual sang-froid, his taste for the absurd and the self-deprecating. While Russia hurtles towards revolution, his hero spends time wondering whether it is best to write in the bath or on a train journey.

Ashenden had never quite made up his mind whether the pleasure of reflection was better pursued in a railway carriage or in a bath. So far as the act of invention was concerned he was inclined to prefer a train that went smoothly and not too fast, and many of his best ideas had come to him when he was thus traversing the plains of France; but for the delight of reminiscence or the entertainment of embroidery upon a theme already in his head he had no doubt that nothing could compare with a hot bath.

This leads into reminiscence about his ill-fated affair with Anastasia Alexandrovna Leonidov which is played entirely for laughs, with the naive young Ashenden behaving like Bertie Wooster to Anastasia’s cartoon impassioned-tragic Russian heroine. Their affair eventually comes to grief because of her insistence that she have scrambled eggs for breakfast every day, without fail. Now he meets up with her again, but it is purely business, as they both work together to try to prop up the government.

Then the Bolsheviks seize power and all Ashenden’s plans are smashed. In the days leading up to the coup, he had been deploying a few Czechs who had been assigned to him (they want Russia to stay in the war so that the Allies win the war so that Austria loses so that Czechoslovakia can be free of Austrian domination) and, despite his best efforts to shake him off, the irritating American Harrington has continued to pursue his damn fool task of getting a commercial agreement with a government which is on the verge of collapse.

On the morning of the revolution Harrington comes into Ashenden’s room where the latter explains the situation and says he better leave, and quickly. But Harrington insists on getting his laundry which he gave to the hotel servants the night before. Anastasia volunteers to help the foolish American and they quickly establish that the dirty laundry has been sent out to a laundry. Harrington sets off to get it, chaperoned by Anastasia who knows the streets.

They find the laundry, have a big argument with the laundress but retrieve the bundle of Mr Harrington’s precious shirts, suits and pyjamas, and are returning when a couple of armoured cars come zooming down the street taking pot shots at passersby. Harrington is shot dead instantly. When Ashenden finds his body, face down in the mud, his hand is still clutched round his bundle of washing.

7. Sanatorium

There are people who say that suffering ennobles. It is not true. As a general rule it makes man petty, querulous and selfish.

Sanatorium was published a full ten years after Ashenden. It has nothing to do with spies. Ashenden is sent to a sanatorium for tuberculosis patients in Scotland. Here he gets to know half a dozen or so of the patients, and becomes involved in their lives and hopes. It’s difficult to summarise, but the story is full of love and kindness and ends on a very moving note.

Sanatorium by Somerset Maugham online

Being a spy

At several points the narrator points out on Ashenden’s behalf that espionage work is boring, not unlike that of a clerk in the City who turns up at his office every day and spends it going through paperwork. He uses this as the basis for a small aesthetic statement, pointing out that art is required to shape and give point to this mundane matter.

Fact, as I said in the preface to the volume in which these stories appeared, is a poor storyteller. It starts a story at haphazard long before the beginning, rambles on inconsequentially, and tails off, leaving loose ends hanging about, without a conclusion. The work of an agent in the Intelligence Department is on the whole monotonous. A lot of it is uncommonly useless. The material it offers for stories is scrappy and pointless; the author himself has to make it coherent, dramatic and probable.

Morality

1. Patriotism

Maybe what comes over most from the stories is Ashenden’s laconic, amused scepticism. I wonder if he was criticised at the time for a lack of patriotism. Certainly ‘R’ tackles this issue head on, saying he has two types of chap working for him, gung-ho, public schoolboy patriots who’ll stop at nothing to biff the Hun; and then cold calculating types like Ashenden, who aren’t all that excited about King and Country and regard the whole thing as an amusing game of chess. The thing is, ‘R’ knows that Ashenden’s type is just as useful as the gung-ho type, more so in the kind of quiet, observant missions he is sent on. They also serve who only stand and mock.

2. Against undergraduate morality

In our day and age when patriotism is not much discussed or praised, the keepers of culture are still obsessed with morality, it is just a different morality from old. In this respect I can see a thousand undergraduate essays being written about Ashenden’s obvious heartlessness in the way he exploits Giulia Lazzari or coldly observes Caypor, the man he knows he is sending to his death.

And as soon as you introduce a feminist perspective on Lazzari, or a post-colonial (i.e. race-focused) perspective on Chandra Lal, the floodgates would open and a million more essays pour forth, all of which condemn Maugham for not sharing the enlightened moral values of 2018.

Which is why discussing ‘morality’ doesn’t interest me. Debating morality suffers from two weaknesses or drawbacks: it is endless and so rarely arrives at a conclusion. And it is obvious.

Obviously, judged by ‘our’ standards, Ashenden is heartless and cruel in his treatment of both people. Obviously, judged by the standards of modern political correctness, he is sexist and racist. But should we be judging him by ‘our’ standards? Maugham himself anticipated all such moralistic approaches and explains:

Ashenden admired goodness, but was not outraged by wickedness. People sometimes thought him heartless because he was more often interested in others than attached to them, and even in the few to whom he was attached his eyes saw with equal clearness the merits and the defects. When he liked people it was not because he was blind to their faults; he did not mind their faults, but accepted them with a tolerant shrug of the shoulders, or because he ascribed to them excellencies that they did not possess; and since he judged his friends with candour they never disappointed him and so he seldom lost one. He asked from none more than he could give.

Maugham observes, it is for others to judge, if they feel the need. If the observation is so detached as sometimes to border on the heartless, well, that is the fault of the world and how people behave, not of the detached observer.

Part of the entertainment of the long chapter on His Excellency His Majesty’s Ambassador to Russia is the way you can’t help hearing the note of admiration in Ashenden’s voice at having met someone even more lofty and disdainful of humanity than himself.

Sir Herbert raised the glass to his nose and inhaled the fragrance. Then he looked at Ashenden. He had a way of looking at people, when he was thinking of something else perhaps, that suggested that he thought them somewhat peculiar but rather disgusting insects. (p.157)

But the accusation of heartlessness obviously rankled. So much so that he repeats his defence of his attitude ten years later in the final story, Sanatorium.

The conversation left Ashenden pensive. People often said he had a low opinion of human nature. It was because he did not always judge his fellows by the usual standards. He accepted, with a smile, a tear or a shrug of the shoulders, much that filled others with dismay.

Acceptance. Acceptance of each other’s weaknesses and folly. That’s what I find so missing in contemporary political, critical and social media discourse, where everyone seems so quick to call out, name and shame, humiliate and attack. Hard not to prefer Maugham’s slow, calm, accepting worldview and attitude.

Ashenden continued to read and with amused tolerance to watch the vagaries of his fellow creatures.

3. Murmurs

Maugham is a suave murmurer. The regularity with which his protagonists murmur a sentence crystallises their role – suave, sophisticated, urbane, detached, laconic, witty, barely speaking.

‘Death so often chooses his moments without consideration,’ murmured Ashenden.

‘In my youth I was always taught that you should take a woman by the waist and a bottle by the neck,’ he murmured.

‘Your hands are like iron, General,’ he murmured.

Ashenden murmured a civil rejoinder.

No need to raise your voice. Never any need to lose your cool.

Fattipuffs and thinifers (and blue eyes)

Having noticed in volume two of the short stories that a lot of Maugham’s characters fall into two pretty simple categories – Fat and jovial or Slim and handsome – I quickly noticed this dichotomy present throughout Ashenden. Thus Chandra Lal’s main feature is that he is fat and oily.

[The photo] showed a flat-faced, swarthy man, with full lips and a fleshy nose; his hair was black, thick and straight, and his very large eyes even in the photograph were liquid and cow-like.

The peasant woman who smuggles his instructions in from France when she attends the weekly market in Geneva is fat and jolly. The rich Egyptian in Ashenden’s hotel, the Khedive is ‘a little fat man with a heavy moustache’. He is attended by:

Mustapha Pasha was a huge fat fellow, of forty-five perhaps, with large mobile eyes and a big black moustache… He was exceedingly voluble and words tumbled out of his mouth tumultuously, like marbles out of a bag. (p.31)

The traitor Caypor is fat as we are relentlessly told: he has a fat face, fat arms, fat hands, and a fat chuckle.

In sharp contrast the good guys are lean and tall and trim. Take ‘R’:

He was a man somewhat above the middle height, lean, with a yellow, deeply-lined face, thin grey hair, and a toothbrush moustache. The thing immediately noticeable about him was the closeness with which his blue eyes were set. (p.9)

Of course, Rose Auburn, the epitome of the Bright Young Things who is the subject of the long conversation between the ambassador and Ashenden, is herself a model of the slender flapper.

She had an exquisitely graceful and slender figure, and her innumerable frocks were always made with a perfect simplicity.

And the piece de resistance of trim elegance is the exquisitely turned out Ambassador to Russia.

Ashenden, as he sat down, gave the ambassador a glance. He was beautifully dressed in a perfectly cut tail-coat that fitted his slim figure like a glove, in his black silk tie was a handsome pearl, there was a perfect line in his grey trousers, with their quiet and distinguished stripe, and his neat, pointed shoes looked as though he had never worn them before. You could hardly imagine him sitting in his shirt-sleeves over a whisky high-ball. He was a tall, thin man, with exactly the figure to show off modern clothes, and he sat in his chair, rather upright, as though he were sitting for an official portrait.

In his cold and uninteresting way he was really a very handsome fellow. His neat grey hair was parted on one side, his pale face was clean-shaven, he had a delicate, straight nose and grey eyes under grey eyebrows, his mouth in youth might have been sensual and well-shaped, but now it was set to an expression of sarcastic determination and the lips were pallid. It was the kind of face that suggested centuries of good breeding, but you could not believe it capable of expressing emotion. You would never expect to see it break into the hearty distortion of laughter, but at the most be for a moment frigidly moved by an ironic smile. (p.151)

Blue eyes

Blue eyes are genetically recessive, which means they are relatively rare. It’s estimated that approximately 8% of the world’s population has blue eyes. But not in Maugham’s fiction, where they are remarkably common. We have met ‘R’s blue eyes, above. Also:

The spy was a stocky little fellow, shabbily dressed, with a bullet-shaped head, close-cropped, fair, with shifty blue eyes and a sallow skin. (p.20)

The baroness has fine features , blue eyes, a straight nose, and a pink and white skin…

There was a little German prostitute, with china-blue eyes and a doll-like face… (p.27)

Mrs Caypor has blue eyes.

Rose Auburn, the heroine of the story Ashenden tells the ambassador, has an ‘oval face, charming little nose and large blue eyes’, ‘blue starry eyes’.

Alex, the woman gymnast the British ambassador has an affair with, has ‘a great deal of hair, golden, but obviously dyed, and large china-blue eyes’.

On the trans-Siberian Express he meets an American salesman and – yes, you guessed it:

Mr. John Quincy Harrington was a very thin man of somewhat less than middle height, he had a yellow, bony face, with large, pale-blue eyes…

And in Sanatorium, when Ashenden is wheeled out onto the sundeck he finds:

On the other side of Ashenden was lying a pretty girl, with red hair and bright blue eyes; she had on no make-up, but her lips were very red and the colour on her cheeks was high.

A new patient arrives at the sanatorium.

After Ashenden had been for some time at the sanatorium there came a boy of twenty. He was in the navy, a sub-lieutenant in a submarine, and he had what they used to call in novels galloping consumption. He was a tall, good-looking youth, with curly brown hair, blue eyes and a very sweet smile. (p.226)

Blue eyes everywhere.

Style

In my review of short stories volume two I highlighted Maugham’s odd way with the word order in his sentences, and attributed it, maybe, to his Victorian roots i.e. as a hangover from the Victorian prose he was raised on.

But I’ve changed my mind. All the Ashenden stories are set abroad and require the protagonist to speak either French or German and, as the foreign locale and the snippets of German or French quoted in the text began to sink in, it dawned on me that the Victorian thesis may be wrong.

All the biographies mention that Maugham was born and raised in the British Embassy in Paris and that French was his first language. Maybe that’s the origin of his odd word order; maybe he’s thinking in French. And maybe his rather foreign approach to English sentence structure was compounded when he spent some years as a student in Heidelberg learning German.

Sentences like the following occur on every page and are not, I suggest, the phraseology that any native English speaker would use.

Two sailors went to the side of the boat and withdrew a bar to allow passage for the gangway, and looking again Ashenden through the howling darkness saw mistily the lights of the quay.

Though he made the journey so often he had always a faint sense of trepidation…

These men were even stupider than he thought; but Ashenden had always a soft corner in his heart for the stupid… (p.18)

A police officer amiable is more dangerous to the wise than a police officer aggressive. (p.19)

Her surname, so far from Teutonic, she owed to her grandfather. (p.25)

He did not know if it was his fancy that he read in her eyes now the despairing thought that she had not the time to wait. (p.38)

The sun was shining as brightly as usual on the square, the shabby little carriages with their scrawny horses, had the same air as before, but they did not any longer fill Ashenden with gaiety. (p.68)

He did not know what were the Mexican’s plans.

Ashenden was in the habit of asserting that he was never bored. It was one of his notions that only such persons were as had no resources in themselves. (p. 77)

He found the carriage in which Guilia Lazzari was, but she sat in a corner… (p.92)

They walked down the hill and reaching the quay for shelter from the cold stood in the lee of the custom-house. (p.101)

He wondered what had been her origins. (p.104)

Ashenden wondered if Gustav was aware that a typewriter could betray its owner as certainly as a handwriting. (p.117)

Most of the hotels were closed, the streets were empty, the rowing boats for hire rocked gently at the water’s edge and there were none to take them. (p.118)

Then entered a very old tall bent man. (p.120)

That frank, jovial red face bore then a look of shifty cunning. (p.122)

He had naturally a pale face and never looked as robust as he was. (p.128)

The shadow of a breeze fluttered the green leaves of the trees; everything invited to a stroll. (p.129)

Ashenden knew in Lucerne a Swiss who was willing on emergency to do odd jobs. (p.141)

Ashenden waited in the hall for a quarter of an hour so that there should appear in him no sign of hurry…

Presently he received a letter from the consul in Geneva to say that Caypor had there applied for his visa…

She was disappointed, but not yet anxious; she knew how irregular at that time was the post. (p.144)

Except to go morning and afternoon to Cook’s she spent apparently the whole day in her room. (p.145)

When first Ashenden met Byring he did not very much take to him. (p.159)

He did not keep his promise. He made her terrific scenes. (p.175)

It’s English, Jim, but not as we know it.

The only man on the ship who spoke English was the purser and though he promised Ashenden to do anything he could to help him, Ashenden had the impression that he must not too greatly count upon him. (p.179)

After Ashenden had been for some time at the sanatorium there came a boy of twenty.

I have given so many examples to show that this unEnglish influence isn’t an occasional hiccup, it is intrinsic to Maugham’s prose style and plays an important part in creating the strange detached, slightly otherworldly effect which Maugham’s stories have on the reader.

Ashenden

Maugham went on to use Ashenden as the narrator of the later novels Cakes and Ale (1930) and The Razor’s Edge (1944).

Somerset Maugham’s books

1930 Cakes and Ale: or, the Skeleton in the Cupboard
1930 The Gentleman in the Parlour: A Record of a Journey From Rangoon to Haiphong
1931 Six Stories Written in the First Person Singular (short story collection)
1932 The Narrow Corner
1933 Ah King (short story collection)
1933 Sheppey (play)
1935 Don Fernando (travel book)
1936 Cosmopolitans (29 x two-page-long short stories)
1937 Theatre (romantic novel)
1938 The Summing Up (autobiography)
1939 Christmas Holiday (novel)

2009 The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham by Selina Hastings

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by Simon on March 28, 2018 • Permalink

Posted in Books, Literature, Short stories, Spy novel

Tagged Collected short stories of Somerset Maugham, Giulia Lazzari, His Excellency, Maugham, Miss King, Mr. Harrington's Washing, Sanatorium, Somerset Maugham, The Hairless mexican, The Traitor, volume two

Posted by Simon on March 28, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/03/28/somerset-maugham-short-stories-volume-three/

Collected short stories of Somerset Maugham volume two

‘It’s rather a long story. I’m afraid it’s not a very nice one and I find it rather difficult to tell. I’m going to ask you not to interrupt me, or to say anything, till I’ve finished.’
(The Force of Circumstance)

William Somerset Maugham’s collected short stories were published in four volumes by Penguin in 1963, and have gone through various editions with numerous publishers in the 55 years since then (at one stage available from Pan, the four volumes are currently published by Vintage).

This is volume two, which contains 24 stories in 400 closely-printed pages, all told with the leisurely urbanity for which Maugham is renowned, the texts unfurling like the turbid rivers which flow past the planters’ bungalows in his tales of the Far East.

She was sitting on the veranda waiting for her husband to come in for luncheon. The Malay boy had drawn the blinds when the morning lost its freshness, but she had partly raised one of them so that she could look at the river. Under the breathless sun of midday it had the white pallor of death. A native was paddling along in a dug out so small that it hardly showed above the surface of the water. The colours of the day were ashy and wan. They were but the various tones of the heat. (It was like an Eastern melody, in the minor key, which exacerbates the nerves by its ambiguous monotony; and the ear awaits impatiently a resolution, but waits in vain.) The cicadas sang their grating song with a frenzied energy; it was as continual and monotonous as the rustling of a brook over the stones. (The Force of Circumstance)

24 stories

Here’s a brief summary of each of the stories, with its publication date, setting and whether the story is told by a third or first person narrator.

The Vessel of Wrath (published in 1931 – set in the Alas Islands, Papua New Guinea – told by a 3rd person narrator) In the remote Alas Islands fat, jovial, Dutch governor Evert Gruyter is astonished when the flat-chested, dried-up old missionary’s sister, Miss Jones, manages to persuade the islands’ resident drunk and ne’er-do-well, Ginger Ted, to marry her.

The Force of Circumstance (1924 – Malaysia – 3rd) In a remote station in Borneo, fat red-faced Guy is perfectly happy with the new wife he’s brought back from England, Doris, until he is forced to confess that, before her arrival, he had lived for some years with a native woman and sired three children. Disgusted, Doris asks for six months to recover her feelings for him, but fails and heads off back to England, leaving a devastated Guy to set up house again with his Dyak wife.

Flotsam and Jetsam (1940 – Borneo – 3rd) Skelton an anthropologist is taken in by gruff, poor planter Norman Grange and his slight, withered, tic-ridden wife, Vesta. Terrified of her husband, Vesta tells Skelton her story – a down at heel actress stranded in the east after the theatre company went bankrupt she jumped at the chance to marry a wealthy planter, only to discover Grange’s poverty when it was too late. When a handsome kindly planter buys an estate nearby she starts a passionate affair with him, only for Grange to find out and shoot the man, who topples onto Vesta covering her in blood. Hence her obsessive, Lady MacBeth-like nervous tics of the hand.

The Alien Corn (1931 – Home Counties – 3rd) Set in very high society, the story is about a successful family of Jews who have completely assimilated to English society and pass themselves off as upper-class English family, the Blands. The narrator knows the more openly Jewish brother of the main family and it is via this contact that he observes the family tragedy, namely that the young son, George (21), wishes more than anything else to become a pianist (the family want him to go into the family business, then inherit the family constituency as an MP). Grudgingly they let him go and study piano in Germany for a few years, where the narrator visits him. Back in England, the narrator is present for the denouement, when the family invite the greatest pianist of the age, Lea Markart, down to their country home to hear the young man perform. George plays his heart out whereupon Madame Makart politely but firmly declares that he will never in a thousand years be up to concert standard. George nods, chats politely to the other house party guests, pops out to the gun room and shoots himself through the heart.

The Creative Impulse (1926 – London – I) A satire on the literary world. The novelist Mrs Albert Forrester lives happily with her compliant, weedy husband Albert, and surrounded by adoring acolytes; she has, we are assured, done absolute marvels with the semi-colon! And then, one fine day, out of the blue, Albert leaves her for the cook, Mrs Bullfinch. When Mrs F confronts Albert and Mrs B in their cosy love nest, wailing that she won’t have enough money to live on, Mrs B looks up from her ironing and throws out the suggestion that she write a detective story. Mrs Albert Forrester mulls this idea over on the Tube back to her apartment, where she announces to her adoring fans that this is precisely what she will do. Genius idea, they all crow, and that is the origin of that noted bestseller, The Achilles Shield.

Virtue (1931 – London – I) The narrator bumps into Gerry Morton who he had met in Borneo and invited to come stay when he was back in London. Now he is so obviously lonely that the narrator introduces him to a very happily married couple, the Bishops and to everyone’s amazement the wife, Margery, has a fling with the unprepossessing young man, eventually leaving her husband, who goes through the phases of a) not believing it b) drinking heavily and, when he learns that his wife is going to travel out to Borneo to be with young Morton, he c) kills himself.

The Man with the Scar (1925 – Guatemala – I) A very short story in which the narrator is told the story behind a beggar with a scar who comes into the local hotel every day. Apparently the beggar was a high-ranking opponent of the current regime, arrested, tried and about to be shot by a firing squad. Granted a last wish he asked to see his beloved for one last kiss, they fetched her and he stabbed her in the neck, killing her, for being unfaithful to him. The officer and men of the firing squad were all so awed that they set him free, and here he is begging in a tourist hotel.

The Closed Shop (1926 – South America – I) The President of an unnamed Latin American country passes a liberal law allowing people to divorce in 30 days. This has the unintended result that lots of Americans descend on the city to file for divorce, almost all of them women, staying for the requisite 30 days and, since they’re dumping their husbands anyway, many of them have flings with the local men. This threatens the livelihood of the local prostitutes who form a deputation of three leading (female) brothel-keepers to visit the president. He treats them courteously, listens, agrees, and adjusts the law to stop American women consorting with local men. The prostitutes’ business booms again, and the narrator assures us that the three madams in question now have enough money to fund their children through expensive colleges in America. Very droll.

The Bum (1929 – Vera Cruz, Mexico – I) Very short story in which the narrator is stalled in the Mexican port of Vera Cruz, waiting for a ship, dines in the same town square every lunchtime and is struck by one beggar who stands out from all the others by dint of his bright red hair. After a few days he realises with a start that it is a man he knew twenty years earlier in Rome, when he was in his early twenties, dashing and handsome who told everyone he was going to become a Great Writer.

The Dream (1924 – Vladivostok – I) Very short story in which the narrator recalls visiting Russia in 1917 (part of Maugham’s real-life MI6 mission to Russia after the March 1917 revolution), being stuck for a day in Vladivostok and dining with a fat ugly Russian who tells him about a recurring dream his wife had of being pushed over the banisters of their 6th floor apartment and plummeting down the stairwell – and which eventually comes true, as the fat Russian describes with an indescribable look of ‘malicious cunning’.

The Treasure (1934 – London – 3rd) Richard Harenger is a successful civil servant. He separates from his wife and goes to live in a flat where he has a cook, a butler, but requires a housemaid. He’s recommended a handsome discreet lady named Pritchard who turns out to be the absolutely perfect servant in every respect, the ‘treasure’ of the title. The story lists the ways she is impeccably turned out, serves at meals immaculately, is always on time and discreet. Eventually, one night at a loose end, Richard comes home to find Pritchard in the flat (she was meant to be going out but had been stood up). On the spur of the moment Richard invites her to the pictures; on a whim invites her for supper; then, as they arrive back at the flat, on an impulse, he kisses her, then… they go to bed. He wakes in the morning thinking what a fool he’s been, how he’s compromised his position for half an hour of fun, how he will have to get rid of her etc. Until Pritchard comes into the bedroom, dressed in formal housemaid uniform, serves his breakfast and lays out his clothes as if nothing had happened. Yes, she really is the perfect housemaid!

The Colonel’s Lady (1946 – 3rd – Country mansion and London) Social satire. George Peregrine is a type of the stiff-upper-lip, Conservative MP, local magistrate, grand landowner and so on, living in his ancestral pile in rural Yorkshire. He discovers that his grey, characterless wife has published a slim volume of verse which has taken London by storm, and he slowly discovers that the book describes a passionate affair between the bored wife of a country landowner and a passionate young man i.e. broadcasts to the world that his wife has been unfaithful to him.

Lord Mountdrago (1939 – London – 3rd) A sort of ghost story. It opens with a portrait of a tall thin cadaverous doctor, Dr Audlin, Maugham’s version of a psychoanalyst, who has discovered an ability to cure and heal troubled people via the talking cure. To his office comes bluff, bullying snob Lord Mountdrago, who happens to be the Foreign Secretary. What slowly emerges is that he’s been having tortured dreams – of attending a grand aristocratic party wearing no trousers, of being ridiculed in the house – and all featuring the vindictive figure of a common, working class Welsh MP. What makes it genuinely eerie is that this same MP appears to know about the dreams and makes smart references to them when Mountdrago bumps into him in Westminster. The tale moves like a dream towards a surprisingly spooky climax. Along the way it allows Maugham, through the character of Audlin, to mull over the way people at large are more surprising, shocking, unexpected, violent and unhappy than any of us realise.

The Social Sense (1929 – London society – I) Tom and Mary Warton are a happily married couple in London’s high society. He is a portrait painter and she a former concert singer. This short story is a profile of their increasingly unhappy marriage, as Tom fails to reach his potential and Mary taunts and humiliates him. For the last 25 years she has in fact being having an affair with ugly but brilliant literary critic, Gerrard Manson. The story, such as it is, finds the narrator sitting next to Mary at a formal dinner while she struggles to conceal her distress at just discovering that Manson has died – while the narrator watches, and helps with small talk, consumed with admiration for her resilience.

The Verger (1929 – a London church – 3rd) A slyly comic, and very short, story about a long-standing verger, Foreman, at a fashionable London church who’s worked himself up from being fourth footman, through various positions with the gentry. The vicar learns that, despite all this, Foreman cannot read and write and, being modern, dismisses him. Foreman goes wandering, dazed through the streets, fancies a fag and finds himself in a long Victorian terrace with no newsagents, and it crosses his mind to open one. Long story short, he gets a loan from the bank, the shop is a success, he finds another London neighbourhood with no convenience shop and opens one, and so on, until ten years later he owns a chain of shops and is worth a mint. Bank manager calls him in to discuss what to do with his fortune and is flabbergasted to learn his best customer can neither read nor write. ‘Why, man, just imagine where you’d be if you could read and write’. ‘I know where I’d be,’ says Foreman with a smile. ‘I would still be verger of St Peter’s church, Neville Square.

In a Strange Land (1924 – Turkey – 1st) opens with a page long meditation on how the narrator/Maugham has found intrepid Englishwomen living in solitude in the most out-of-the-way places. As an example he tells the story of the time he checked into a shabby hotel in Turkey and was surprised to find it kept by a former lady’s maid from England. She had been married to a dashing Italian who had an affair with a Greek girl and had two sons. The Italian died some time ago and the handsome young chaps still adore her. As with much of Maugham it is a short exercise in unexpected psychology.

The Taipan (1922 – Shanghai – 3rd) A very short ghost story, reminiscent of Kipling’s imperial horror stories. A successful Brit, brought up in suburban Barnes and now running a big business in China, living in a mansion with three servants, strolls through the English cemetery and sees two coolies digging a grave. When he asks people in his office and officials they all deny any Brits have died. That evening he drinks to much at the club, wakes in the night in a panic, and is found next morning stone dead. The grave was for him boom boom!

The Consul (1922 – China – 3rd – Interesting to learn that this, The Taipan, and three other stories were published in a volume titled Foreign Devils in Asia.) Another very short and relatively early story, just a few pages long. A working class woman in England marries a Chinese lodger who gives the impression he is rich and lives in a palace. When they arrive at this out of the way town she discovers to her horror that he is fairly poor, lives in a grimy little hut with his domineering mother and – this is the final straw – his first, Chinese wife! She goes to see the vain, pukka British consul with an endless litany of complaints but what drives him to distraction is that, despite the whole situation and endless provocations, she refuses to leave him. The consul offers to arrange accommodation with some missionary ladies and then travel back to England but she refuses. Extremely frustrated the consul asks why, to which she replies:

‘There’s something in the way his hair grows on his forehead that I can’t help liking.’

A Friend in Need (1925 – Japan – I) Edward Hyde Burton is a tiny man in his 60s who has carved out a successful career as a businessman in Japan. After two pages setting the scene where the story is told (gin fizzes at the Grand Hotel in Yokohama) the narrator finds himself listening as Burton tells the story of a white man who arrived in Yokohama, socialised, played cards, and turned up on our Burton’s doorstep one day stony broke after losing all his money at poker. Burton asks if the chap has any talents and the other reveals that he can swim, that in fact he swam for his university. Well, says our man, swim round the cape, about three miles, I’ll meet you with a car and towels at the beach and we’ll see about a job. Surprised and puzzled, the other agrees and leaves the office. Eye witnesses say he arrived at the start beach, stripped to his costume and set off into the water – but never arrived at the finish beach. Drink and dissipation had undermined his constitution. The narrator asks, ‘Didn’t you realise he’d be drowned?’ Little, innocent, white-haired Burton replies: ‘Let’s put it this way: I didn’t have a vacancy in the office.’ The narrator – like the reader – is quietly appalled at the dark depths of even the most inoffensive-seeming people.

The Round Dozen (1924 – a resort on the South Coast of England – I) A broadly comic story in which the narrator is resting at a south coast resort when he meets two sets of people: at the hotel is a very old-fashioned elderly couple, the St Clairs, who he enjoys spending time with because they remind him of his Victorian youth, accompanied by their fifty-something daughter, Miss Porchester, who has a trim figure and silver hair. And out on his rambles, the narrator several times encounters a shabby-looking man who cadges cigarettes off him before revealing, with a flourish, that he is none other than Mortimer Ellis, the famous bigamist. (It is a comic and typical moment when he reveals this and Maugham looks on without changing expression, having never heard of him.)

‘I’ve had eleven wives, sir’, he went on.
‘Most people find one about as much as they can manage.’ I replied.

Ellis gives Maugham the inside dope on What Women Want and how to get them to marry you. He was eventually caught by one of his wives and sentenced to five years in gaol, has only recently got out, hence the shabbiness and the cadging. And, he explains to the narrator, it’s always irked him that he only married eleven wives – such an uneven, lopsided number: twelve would have been much better, like the disciples or signs of the zodiac. To cut a long story short, Ellis ends up persuading the quiet spinster daughter of the Victorian couple to run away with him, much to the narrator’s amusement.

The Human Element (1930 – London and Rhodes – I) In Rome in the off season the narrator bumps into Humphrey Carruthers, a pompous humourless man from the Foreign Office who he is then forced to see socially a few times. To his surprise, on one of these occasions Carruthers breaks down and tells him the long story of his unrequited love for Lady Betty. The story then stops for a long recap of the career of Lady Betty, Maugham’s portrait of an archetypical Bright Young Thing, the young hedonists who filled the gossip columns and celebrity pages after the Great War. (It is bracing to see Maugham pooh-pooh the brainless worship of celebrities, of gossip columns, of the way they endorsed beauty products – all a hundred years ago: nothing changes.)

Our hostess had a weakness for the persons technically known as celebrities.

Carruthers falls heavily for Lady Betty but she is thronged by admirers. She disappoints them all by marrying the very rich son of a northern businessman and, as a result, slowly becomes less of a fixture of wild parties at fashionable nightclubs. However gossip soon spreads that the marriage is failing. The husband goes off to sanatoria on the continent, leaving Lady Betty at home. Eventually they separate and Lady Betty goes to live on the Greek island of Rhodes. But Carruthers has never forgotten her. He wangles an invitation to go and stay with her for a fortnight and this is the core of the story he tells the narrator: he spends the first week of his stay nerving himself to propose to the love of his life, but then, one night, he discovers her swimming naked and giggling with the chauffeur, a rough, brawny, handsome specimen. In a flash Carruthers realises they have been lovers for a decade, that the marriage to the northern businessman was only for his money. As a snob, Carruthers is appalled; as a lover he is prostrate with grief. And this is the story he pours out over cocktails in a Rome restaurant to Maugham who, being the urbane man of the world that he is, keeps it to himself but rather approves of her conduct.

Jane (1923 – London – I) A broadly comic story about two ladies in their fifties – Mrs Tower, the type of London society hostess Maugham is always being invited to parties by, and her plain sister-in-law, Jane Fowler, very straitlaced, traditionally dressed and dull. To everyone’s amazement, Jane becomes engaged to a stylish young man 27 years her junior, Gilbert Napier, who finds her funny and attractive. Gilbert proceeds to completely revamp her appearance, designing dresses to bring out her surprisingly beautiful neck and shoulders, inviting her to parties and so on. The narrator goes on a long trip abroad and when he returns is astonished to discover that Jane has become the talking point of the season, dressed in her astonishing outfits and reducing all and sundry to tears of hilarity with her blunt plain-speaking conversation. Barely have we processed this transformation than there is another one, that Jane separates from hapless Gilbert and elopes with an admiral.

Footprints in the Jungle (1927 – Malaya – I) A fairly long story in which the narrator plays bridge (as so often) with a charming couple, the Cartwrights, and the local head of police Gaze. Later that evening, over drinks, Gaze tells the long story of how the strong sturdy Mrs Cartwright’s first husband, Bronson, was found shot dead in the jungle and how it took him a long time to compile the evidence leading him to think he was murdered by Cartwright who, he thinks, was having an affair with the wife and had impregnated her. The couple murdered Bronson, and then married. And you know what – you couldn’t meet a happier or nicer couple.

The Door of Opportunity (1931 – Malaya – 3rd) A very powerful story, given force by its artful construction. In part one an English couple arrive back in London from service in Malaya, the tall handsome man, Alban, brimming with excitement to be back in London. But we realise that his wife, Anne, is not happy and, once they’ve checked into a hotel and he’s gone off to visit his club, she makes plans to pack her things and leave him. Why?

Now comes the central flashback of the story which details their life in the small remote station in Malaya. Alban is universally disliked because he is tall, handsome, well educated, intellectual and sensitive. Anne doesn’t care; she is, in contrast, short and monkey faced, but they understand each other perfectly. Until the day of the coolie rebellion when the workers on a rubber plantation some distance away in the jungle rise up and murder the owner, Prynne, injuring his manager, who makes it to Anne and Alban’s station more dead than alive.

This is when it happens: Alban tends the injured man, ascertains the facts and then, instead of setting off with the handful of men at his disposal to confront the murdering natives, he announces that he will send a launch to the nearest town for reinforcements and wait. The wounded manager is surprised. Anne is horrified. She looks into his soul and realises he is a coward.

After two tense days, a police man arrives from the town with 20 Sikh soldiers and they set off on a night-time journey upriver. But instead of finding rampaging coolies, they find a jolly fat Dutch planter who has quelled the whole ‘rebellion’ within hours of it occurring with just two assistants. Alban is shown up as being an over-cautious coward.

He is called down to town to answer to the governor: the governor is impressed by the rational lucidity of Alban’s defence, but sacks him nonetheless. The image of the brave, decisive white man must be kept up, and Alban has let the side down. What is fascinating is the accuracy with which Maugham depicts the reactions of all concerned, the other chaps in the club, the wives, the padre, the governor and his wife – sympathetic but all agreed: the chap must go.

So Alban is fired and sails back to England with Anne. In the final pages Anne tells him just what she thinks of him, how he has let not just himself down but everything they believed in, art and intelligence; how she loathes and detests him and is leaving him. Tall, handsome Alban collapses in tears but Anne walks out.

Comments

I shall draw attention to:

Maugham’s prose style, its smooth leisureliness but frequent oddities
his eye for a good figure, male or female
the settings, in the Far East or the Home Counties
the way he changed the titles of the stories
Maugham’s oddly mundane quotability
Maugham’s ‘philosophy’

1. Prose style

Leisurely

‘Excuse me sir, but am I right in thinking that you are the well-known author?’ (The round dozen)

Maugham’s tone and approach is spectacularly leisurely and relaxed. True, it varies a little from story to story, the really short ones being, of necessity, relatively pithy. But, given enough space, Maugham likes to start a story with the kind of long-winded introductions which remind you of Victorian essayists.

Take, for example, the two-page introduction to Virtue, which starts by describing exactly the type of Havana cigar the author enjoys before going on to consider the oddity of the life force which has evolved countless millions of creatures over billions of years so that a lamb cutlet ends up on your plate or a brace of oysters are served on ice. By such oddities and quirks are human lives decided.

The contrast between Maughan’s leisurely style and his often biting narratives

It is only after these leisurely lucubrations that the author finally gets round to describing the random chance by which he bumps into an acquaintance from Borneo in Bond Street and unintentionally sets off the chain of events which the story describes (summarised above). Having got to the end of the tale, and been as surprised and shocked as the narrator by the tragic, drunken suicide of fat jovial Charlie Bishop – it is disconcerting to look back at the opening pages about cigars and sheep from this now bitter perspective; the author’s calm urbane tone seeming incongruous and almost surreal.

The same device is used for The human element where there is a long page and a half of leisurely thoughts about Rome in the off season before we get anywhere near meeting the main character, Carruthers.

I looked around me with satisfaction. It is very agreeable to find yourself alone in a great city which is not yet quite strange to you and in a large empty hotel. It gives you a delectable sense of freedom. I felt the wings of my spirit give a little flutter of delight.

Or in The round dozen which opens with the author’s impression of English seaside resorts. The technique in all these stories is to lull you into the author’s worldview, sedate, civilised, slow and leisurely – to slow you right down to his speed, before introducing any of the characters.

This element of slowing down – more than any of the actual plotlines – may partly account for the stories’ success and enduring appeal. In a world of rush and stress, they are immensely relaxing.

Riverscapes

The Far East stories, of course, contain extended descriptions of the scenery, the jungles and especially the rivers of Borneo and Malaysia, like the excerpt at the top of this review. For practical reasons of transport most of the colonial stations in remote places seem to have been on rivers, but it also occurs to me that this is very convenient from the writer’s point of view, because ‘the river’ is a ready-made symbol. And wide, powerful, slow-moving rivers naturally lend themselves to being similes, metaphors and symbols of the slowly unfolding patterns of human destiny.

And they’re picturesque. After reading only a handful of tales from the East you have the impression of having yourself watched countless poignant sunsets or meaningful dawns breaking over wide muddy rivers. Again – very relaxing.

Oddities

Maugham’s prose aspires to a leisurely graciousness, and yet it is prone to a variety of quirks and oddities which prevent it ever achieving real elegance. There are one or two moments on every page which disrupt the flow or give you pause. No page goes by without you being brought up short by odd phrasing. You are continually reminded that this is not modern prose, that its roots are in Victorian stylistics and yet these moments occur in prose which is happy to use a range of modern idioms and whose characters use (fairly) slangy expressions – resulting in an odd mix of twentieth and nineteenth centuries.

The main feature is his odd ordering of clauses within long sentences, his idiosyncratic word order

‘If you’re going to do that I think to take up any more of your time can only be a waste of mine.’ (Lord Mountdrago)

These men, living for many years with one another lives that were methodically regulated, had acquired a number of little idiosyncracies. (The Taipan)

He paid no attention to his house which was always in great disorder, nor to his food; his boys gave him to eat what they liked and for everything he had made him pay through the nose…

And now, turning out of the street in which was the consulate, he made his way to the city wall… (The Consul)

I was like an archaeologist who finds some long-buried statue and I was thrilled in so unexpected a manner to hit upon this survival of a past era. (The Round Dozen)

He soon ceased to choose every morning from his wardrobe the tie he wanted, for he found that she put out for him without fail the one he would have himself selected. (The Treasure)

I had to read some of these sentences two or three times to be quite certain of the meaning. They’re not grammatically incorrect but his ordering of clauses, his word order, is often pretty idiosyncratic. In fact, reading a bunch of these examples one after the other forces the thought that maybe it’s plain clumsy.

I had not looked forward with any enthusiasm to the probability which I so clearly foresaw that he would favour me with an account of his matrimonial experiences, but now I waited if not with eagerness at least with curiosity for a further observation. (The Round Dozen)

I am an amateur of humour and I sought to discover in what lay her peculiar gift. (Jane)

He was a man who took his work hardly, worrying himself to death over every trifle. (The Consul)

The imagination lingers here gratefully, for in the Federated Malay States the only past is within the memory for the most part of the fathers of living men. (Footprints in the Jungle)

Trivial though it may be, he has a particular way of positioning ‘had’ in the place which makes it stick out unnaturally in a sentence.

It was impossible not to perceive the fineness of her character. It had even nobility.

The hall was large and low, with the same whitewashed walls, and he had immediately an impression of comfort and luxury.

If you were marking an essay by a student learning English, you would say they had got the word order wrong. But after a while, reading Maugham, you come to expect these clunky broken-backed sentences, the odd word order, and the peculiar phraseology – it becomes part of his charm.

He has an elegant tone and attitude and describe elegant characters in elegant settings. But his prose is not elegant or stylish.

2. Fine figures

Slim Maugham likes slender figures, male or female. He admires a fine deportment, a commanding presence. He likes tall and slim.

Jack Carr his name was. He was quite a different sort of chap from Norman; for one thing he was a gentleman, he’d been to a public school and a university; he was about thirty-five, tall, not beefy like Norman, but slight, he had the sort of figure that looked lovely in evening dress; and he had crisp curling hair and a laughing look in his eyes. (Flotsam and Jetsam)

He had been putting on weight lately, but was still a fine figure of a man; tall, with grey curly hair, only just beginning to grow thin on the crown, frank blue eyes, good features and a high colour. (The Colonel’s Lady)

I observed that he was in his way good-looking; his features were regular, his grey eyes were handsome, he had a slim figure. (The Human Element)

The younger woman had her back turned to me and at first I could see only that she had a slim and youthful figure. (The Round Dozen)

She was dressed in white. Her arms, her face, her neck, were deeply burned by the sun; her eyes were bluer than he had ever seen them and the whiteness of her teeth was startling. She looked extremely well. She was very trim and neat. (The Human Element)

I remembered him as a curly-headed youngster, very fresh and clean-looking. He was always neat and dapper, he had a good figure, and he held himself well, like a man who’s used to taking a lot of exercise. (Footprints in the Jungle)

He was just under six feet tall, and slim, and he wore his clothes well, and his clothes were well cut. He had fair hair, still thick, and blue eyes and the faintly yellow skin common to men of that complexion after they have lost the pink-and-white freshness of early youth. (The Door of Opportunity)

And eyes. Maugham is always alert to the state of his characters’ eyes. They are often large and soulful eyes.

It was not hard to believe that in youth he had been as beautiful as people said. He had still his fine Semitic profile and the lustrous black eyes that had caused havoc in so many a Gentile breast. He was very tall, lean, with an oval face and a clear skin… He had kept his figure and held himself as magnificently as ever. (The Alien Corn)

She had never been handsome and the passing years had changed her little. She had still those fine dark eyes and her face was astonishingly unlined. She was very simply dressed and if she wore make–up it was so cunningly put on that I did not perceive it. She had still the charm she had always had of perfect naturalness and of a kindly humour. (Virtue)

She had a neat figure. That was her best point. That and her eyes. They were very large, of a deep brown, liquid and shining; they were full of fun, but they could be tender on occasion with a charming sympathy. (The Door of Opportunity)

In The human element Lady Betty, a kind of force of nature, an embodiment of youth and enthusiasm, has her deep blue eyes described again and again, shining with joy, radiating a part bantering part tender look, shining with sudden gaiety, and so on. In Footprints in the jungle the pale blue eyes of the protagonist, Mrs Cartwright, are referred to again and again.

Maugham was bisexual, and I think there’s something of that in the way his head is turned equally by a handsome man or a shapely lady. Both have their appeal – so long as they are slim and elegant.

Fat Fat people, on the other hand, are generally also short, red-faced and jovial – Chaucerian publicans until, that is, they collapse in tears, like Charlie Bishop in Virtue or Guy in The Force of Circumstance.

He was twenty-nine, but he was still a school-boy; he would never grow up. That was why she had fallen in love with him, perhaps, for no amount of affection could persuade her that he was good-looking. He was a little round man, with a red face like the fall moon, and blue eyes. He was rather pimply. She had examined him carefully and had been forced to confess to him that he had not a single feature which she could praise. She had told him often that he wasn’t her type at all. ‘I never said I was a beauty,’ he laughed. ‘I can’t think what it is you see in me.’ But of course she knew perfectly well. He was a gay, jolly little man, who took nothing very solemnly, and he was constantly laughing. He made her laugh too. He found life an amusing rather than a serious business, and he had a charming smile. When she was with him she felt happy and good tempered. And the deep affection which she saw in those merry blue eyes of his touched her. It was very satisfactory to be loved like that. Once, sitting on his knees, during their honeymoon she had taken his face in her hands and said to him: ‘You’re an ugly, little fat man, Guy, but you’ve got charm. I can’t help loving you.’

The Vessel of Wrath features the fat, jovial, Dutch governor Evert Gruyter through whose eyes we see the surprising love story of Ginger Ted and Miss Jones. And the final story features another fat Dutchman, Van Hasseldt, who puts down the coolie rebellion almost single handedly`.

It’s not that fat symbolises one particular virtue or that slim and trim is always good – it’s just noticeable that a number of Maugham’s characters do tend to fall into these fairly obvious categories.

3. Painting a scene

Malaya

When the little coasting steamer set them down at the mouth of the river, where a large boat, manned by a dozen Dyaks, was waiting to take them to the station, her breath was taken away by the beauty, friendly rather than awe-inspiring, of the scene. It had a gaiety, like the joyful singing of birds in the trees, which she had never expected. On each bank of the river were mangroves and nipah palms, and behind them the dense green of the forest. In the distance stretched blue mountains, range upon range, as far as the eye could see. She had no sense of confinement nor of gloom, but rather of openness and wide spaces where the exultant fancy could wander with delight. The green glittered in the sunshine and the sky was blithe and cheerful. The gracious land seemed to offer her a smiling welcome. (The Force of Circumstance)

The Far East stories contain yards of this sort of thing. It is extremely restful and relaxing.

London society

Maugham was phenomenally posh. His father and grandfather were eminent lawyers and his elder brother, Frederick, served as Lord Chancellor and was made 1st Viscount Maugham. Thus his gentlemanly characters have no trouble at all dining in the finest restaurants, conversing with lords and ladies, being introduced to cabinet ministers and kings.

Before I began these books I had the impression from summaries that Maugham’s books were about posh planter society in Malaysia. This is misleading on two accounts: 1. The Far East stories seem to concern men in rather desperate straits, men in extremely isolated outposts, rather than ‘society’ in places like Singapore. 2. They are in a minority. The majority of the stories are set in England, most of those in a London of extremely posh dinner parties, parties, cocktail parties and receptions. Or ‘at home’ in the swank country houses of, for example, the Blands in The alien corn or the colonel’s country house in The colonel’s lady.

You’d have thought the unvarying tone of this high society might get a bit stifling, or be plain off-putting, except that the Maugham narrator is so dryly ironic, so observant of human foibles and weakness, and tells his stories so compellingly, that you feel quite at home in these remote and lofty milieu.

There is an element of manners. Maugham is a gentleman and his stories have perfect manners, in the sense that they admit you as an equal to these upper class circles. He never talks down to the reader. Because his ironic attitude to human nature extends to everyone, it is democratic. You feel privileged to eavesdrop on such juicy gossip.

4. Titles

Many of the stories were renamed after their initial appearance. In all cases the titles get shorter, sometimes reduced to just one word. Thus:

The Verger was originally The man who made his mark
Lord Mountdrago was originally Doctor and patient
Neil Macadam was originally The Temptation of Neil Macadam
The social sense was originally The extraordinary sex
Louise was originally The most selfish woman I knew
The Man Who Wouldn’t Hurt a Fly becomes the more teasing A friend in need

And so on. It’s interesting, this trend towards brevity, making things more pregnant with meaning, or symbolism – or just more abbreviated and tight. It’s oddly contrary to the actual approach of the stories which is almost always leisurely, slow and wordy.

5. Quotes

Maugham isn’t Oscar Wilde. He isn’t to do with wit and clever paradox. The opposite, really, his thoughts are rather run of the mill and his style is neither compressed nor stylishly paradoxical; it is wordy and prolix. But nonetheless, precisely because he (and his characters) are given to such lengthy lucubrations on life and its peculiarities, he often ends up expressing general thoughts about human nature which have a sort of ruminative appeal.

It is a funny thing about life, if you refuse to accept anything but the best you very often get it. (The treasure)

Life is really very fantastic, and one has to have a peculiar sense of humour to see the fun of it. (Virtue)

If the folly of men made one angry one would pass one’s life in a state of chronic ire. (Virtue)

People are always a little disconcerted when you don’t recognize them, they are so important to themselves, it is a shock to discover of what small importance they are to others. (The Human Element)

No day is so dead as the day before yesterday. (The round dozen)

Courage is the obvious virtue of the stupid. (The Door of Opportunity)

She managed (as so few people do) to look exactly what she was. (Jane)

See what I mean by not really witty or very insightful. More the calm, steady, civilised reflections of a well-travelled, urbane man of the world.

Women are always sensitive to the self-sacrifice of others. (Virtue)

The worst of having so much tact was that you never quite knew whether other people were acting naturally or being tactful too. (The Human Element)

6. Maugham’s philosophy

Nothing profound, the opposite really. Maugham’s view is that people are really a lot more complex than they let on. There’s more to us than meets the eye.

For thirty years now I have been studying my fellow–men. I do not know very much about them. I should certainly hesitate to engage a servant on his face, and yet I suppose it is on the face that for the most part we judge the persons we meet. We draw our conclusions from the shape of the jaw, the look in the eyes, the contour of the mouth. I wonder if we are more often right than wrong.

Why novels and plays are so often untrue to life is because their authors, perhaps of necessity, make their characters all of a piece. They cannot afford to make them self–contradictory, for then they become incomprehensible, and yet self–contradictory is what most of us are. We are a haphazard bundle of inconsistent qualities. (A friend in need)

What gives this remarkably shallow idea its weight is the narrative that follows, in which an apparently harmless little man turns out to have unsuspected depths of malice in him.

Maugham is right that it is the people who make his stories. There are hardly any intellectual insights, and his occasional tangle with intellectual milieus – his satires on the literary world, his description of a painter or a musician – carry little conviction. But the way he manages to convey the peculiarity of being human, how we are prey to all kinds of odd and contradictory impulses; and how profoundly other people remain unpredictable mysteries to us – that is fascinating, riveting, and what makes every single one of his stories worth reading.

Somerset Maugham’s books

1930 Cakes and Ale: or, the Skeleton in the Cupboard
1930 The Gentleman in the Parlour: A Record of a Journey From Rangoon to Haiphong
1931 Six Stories Written in the First Person Singular (short story collection)
1932 The Narrow Corner
1933 Ah King (short story collection)
1933 Sheppey (play)
1935 Don Fernando (travel book)
1936 Cosmopolitans (29 x two-page-long short stories)
1937 Theatre (romantic novel)
1938 The Summing Up (autobiography)
1939 Christmas Holiday (novel)

2009 The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham by Selina Hastings

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by Simon on March 27, 2018 • Permalink

Posted in Books, English literature, Short stories

Posted by Simon on March 27, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/03/27/somerset-maugham-short-stories-volume-two/

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All posts tagged Maugham

The set-up

The magician

The main characters

The plot

The role of Dr Porhoët

The crisis of the plot

Haddo’s campaign of seduction

The wrong marriage

Haddo and Margaret’s peregrinations

They abduct Margaret

Arthur goes to Haddo’s country house

Back to England, back to Skene

Fiery climax

The pleasures of the text

Entertainment

Escapism

Manners

The movie

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Mrs Craddock

Response

Sex and lust

The battle of the sexes

Maugham and women

The New Woman

Boldness about marriage

Boldness about religion

Miss Ley

Oscar Wilde

A tiny Marxist comment

Plus ça change

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Background

The plot

Part two

Dolce far niente

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The characters

Comedy

Act Two

Act Three

Adaptations

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Cakes and Ale

The events

The plot

Two track narrative

Love

Happy

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The journey

Pause for reflection

Meeting people

Descriptions

Maughamese

A life of ease

Books and art

The British Empire

Soulful moments

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Overview of the stories